


Canzoni Per Bambini

by Anusaya



Series: the adult life shenanigans and/or occasional romantic misadventures series [2]
Category: Katekyou Hitman Reborn!
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-22
Updated: 2013-03-21
Packaged: 2017-11-19 07:21:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 27,950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/570678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anusaya/pseuds/Anusaya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>[COMPLETE. /o/] Sequel to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/414498">In Medias Res</a>. 6996 (and various other characters/pairings along the way), TYL from present timeline.</p><p>Chrome had been told, long ago, that death was merely another stage of the cycle. From teenager to adult -- birth and loss and all the emotions in between. Then, of course, there's Mukuro, but that's another story entirely. Adulthood isn't exactly high on his priority list, and emotions aren't exactly things he's comfortable with. Nevertheless, life has a habit of happening to you whether you accept it easily or whether you go down kicking and screaming about a sea of blood. Maturity, after all, comes in many forms.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. all in the family

**Author's Note:**

> I've seen a few lovely TYL BABY-FICS, but never for 6996, surprisingly! :') SO I THOUGHT, it must exist. And I've been brainstorming this for a while, but it's my first time actually writing dynamics like these. MOST OF my writing has been dedicated to the preceding... events (see In Medias Res).

"Neuilly," whose name only a handful of the Japanese-speaking Vongola operatives could pronounce (with the rest having given up and re-christened her "the baby," with it being a matter of good fortune that the Arcobaleno had aged enough to reduce misunderstanding as to what baby was being spoken about) had experienced all of her shots and vaccinations. 

She had a certificate of live birth, a record of a thumb print, and a picture of her scowling newborn face at what Mukuro had termed the peak Winston Churchill phase of babydom -- which was not quite accurate, given that she had a soft patch of dark infant-down hair even during her earliest hours. A spring baby, born at the changing of the seasons, created during the peak of the summer months, named after the location in France in which she had been conceived. 

_You see,_ Mukuro had said. _It's rather like one of those tags at the bottom of a product. 'Made in ... China,' for example. Only, in this case... her tag would be 'Made in France,' and made with copious Italian wine consumption._

Even Yamamoto had approved of this straightforward train of thought in naming progeny, saying _haha, that makes sense._ It was comments like these which made Mukuro want to ironically pat him on the head.

Family is what you make of it. So what was one to make of their patchwork mafia family, their mixed Italian bloodlines and thriving Japanese boys and girls, their orphaned and adopted children?

Of the Guardians, the first baby born to a full-blooded Japanese _maman_ , dubiously Italian _papan_ , French-named, with a French foster brother abducted from neglect in France.

Chrome's child emerged from the pocket of her undestroyed uterus, low enough to have survived the wreckage of her body, beneath the illusory sewn-together nerve clusters of her abdomen, which had been perilous for years, and monitored by over-paid specialists.

Chrome watched her lifestyle, her exercise, her diet, her heart, made allowances, sometimes fainted, sometimes struggled to rise in the morning, sometimes experienced pains, feared driving half-blind. A life with a partial disability was certainly still a full life. The child, with two eyes and all of her organs, had survived that embyronic existence amid illusion and absence and risk, and she had made it out. 

Perhaps _miracle_ was an over-used word. But survival was not to be taken for granted. Certainly not by their family, blood relatives and extended figures alike.

~*~

The day that would change Chrome's life forever begins, very simply, with the following narrative:

Sawada Tsunayoshi, upon hearing the doorbell ring and assuming, implicitly, the source to be a) his former tutor, b) one of his numerous companions, here to begin the daily process of destroying his house, or c) Mukuro, causing trouble (there was also the option of d) someone from an allied Family, but they tended not to _knock_ so much as send cryptic encoded messages via the highly secure and esteemed Vongola-Mafia-Allies Facebook club) answered and found himself greeted by a couple of official-looking men in black suits and ties. When he stared at them with a level of sheepishness one would not _necessarily_ expect of the sort-of-but-still-mostly-denying-the-name-of Vongola Tenth, steeling himself for any questions as to anything, or so he thought, one of the men squinted a little, raised a Serious eyebrow, and Very Seriously asked, "Do you know of a Mr. Terry Cloth and a Miss or Mrs. Lotta Krap? They're wanted in 45 countries, and -- "

It just so happened to be another of those mid-mornings when Gokudera Hayato and Yamamoto Takeshi and Bianchi and Dino Cavallone and Fuuta and Lambo had all found themselves in various parts of Tsuna's house already. At the question, Dino had sputtered with laughter like a car being unsuccessfully cranked, and Gokudera had grunted loud disapproval.

Tsuna, numb with something that could most probably be identified as secondhand embarrassment, answered _no, sorry_ , closed the door and turned around, eager to escape back into his home.

Fuuta, who was sitting at the table with his ranking book, announced (unnecessarily), "The ranking planet tells me Rokudo Mukuro is ranked #1 in lying liars who lie about their names, Tsuna-nii." He then smiled brightly. For some reason.

"I still can't believe that bastard," Gokudera was saying, the usual confirmation-bias where Mukuro was concerned. "Doing this to the baby and Chrome. It's bad for the Family, and --" Because their net Family was, in all forms, his primary concern, and Gokudera could not brook any disruption except disruptions named Gokudera. But he could especially not brook any disruption named Mukuro. " _TENTH_ , I really think we should go have words!"

Tsuna got as far as, "But, Gokudera -- " 

Meaning to finish with some statement about how they didn't know what "this" Mukuro was "doing" and, really, they didn't know if there was a doing or even a Mukuro, though it seemed that, at the very least, Tsuna wanted to ask his neighbour: Just _whose_ name is your house in, anyway?

\-- but Bianchi, as it so happened (at the oven, though Tsuna was fairly certain Kyoko had not extended any explicit invitation to her that morning, and he certainly hadn't), cut him off: "Hayato," she chided, "you mustn't be so dramatic." 

Tsuna did think that sounded like a reasonable thing to say, until she added, "The true drama here is the thrill of love. Only a very _in love_ couple experiences the pleasures of selecting fake names together while committing espionage." A single tear had settled in the long lashes of each of her eyes.

"Hey," Yamamoto put in, "Who were those guys asking about earlier? Did you get someone else's mail, Tsuna?" His face was as amiable as ever, and it was then any onlooker could plainly see he had Yamamoto'd out the entire pre-existing conversation. "I hope they find that Terry Cloth guy so whatever it is can be worked out, haha."

"Besides," Bianchi continued, pleased with her reverie (as Gokudera proceeded to shout down Yamamoto, in standard fashion). "I've worked with Rokudo Mukuro before." She was running her fingernails through her hair, tossing it over her shoulder characteristically, eyes heavy-lidded, nostalgic, and soft. "He knows what I would tell Chrome -- if the situation ever becomes harmful to her, she should do the sensible thing and poison him. If he dies, it's not love."

"And how did that go over with Mukuro?" 

This was Dino, currently on a visit from Italy, and currently in Tsuna's kitchen, making a mess of his coffee by opening sugar packets and spilling the contents all over the counter. His pet turtle, perilously near unto the sink, was lapping at the grains. Tsuna had noticed, wondering absently if turtles were actually supposed to eat sugar, but then, as far as he knew, turtles were not supposed to grow massive and destroy houses. The rules of reality in general were put aside when it came to the people with whom he had grown up.

"He laughed and applauded my way of thinking, actually." Bianchi raked her long, lacquered-red fingernails across the table at which she moved to sit across from Fuuta. "Are you willing to die for love, Dino Cavallone?"

Something in her (smoky, lidded) eyes suggested that the question was not entirely rhetorical, and although Dino only awkward-smiled, his dating record (which, some believed, also now included the woman who had asked the question, although it wasn't official so far as anyone knew) was enough to make anyone wonder if perhaps he agreed with her logic on some level.

Ten years had exhausted Gokudera's huffing about Rokudo Mukuro and Bianchi's vitriolic tone, as well the ire of the others, rendering their collective attitude into a sort of sputtering background noise. Their grumbling, intermingled as it was with concern for Chrome and the family, was so familiar that it had almost become a counterintuitive form of affection.

But there was also a long-held reality that lay beneath the tensions of the Vongola affiliations. Mukuro's expensive household made no logical sense. Strife still existed amid the families of Europe, and all throughout the world, to one degree or another. Today, it's a peace treaty. Tomorrow, it's a negotiation for the shipment of medical supplies, guarded in the transfer. 

Right now, it's an overcrowded mid-morning apropos of nothing.

~*~

Mukuro read the world news at the beginning of every day, related the information to Chrome, and when he was not busy with this, he was refreshing himself on scriptures, studying history, esoteric literature, or -- often enough -- common, trashy paperbacks. He had never attended college, but he worked his own information network of puppet-handled mafiosi.

Truthfully, his temperament inclined towards being easily bored, always heating or cooling the coffee with a touch, changing the decorations of the walls, restructuring the child's room or the study, covertly hacking the off-shore investments of billionares and slipping copious funds into his own bank account. M.M. had taught him how to do that, and though she had been once arrested for felonies and frauds, he had not. He would pace and whisper to himself, smiling whimsically.

"Dear Chrome," he would begin. "This article I pinned under -- " (A _nom de plume_ , and the contents would be a leak of highly classified information, for those made the most entertaining disruptions.) "-- certainly did fare well with the public."

Then he would elaborate upon the details at great, theatrical length.

Before Tsuna had been visited on that day, before he and his friends had begun to fret about the Mist state of affairs, Chrome was making a grocery list and lamenting her sugar addiction. The baby had left her body and left behind fifteen pounds. She had judiciously eradicated every runway-laden fashion magazine lying about the house, the byproducts of mailing lists that neither Chrome nor her partner had subscribed to. Mukuro might miss them, but she would not.

"I'm going to the store," she said to him that morning. "We need... cabbage... spinach... tomatoes..."

"There's nothing that begins a day quite like the purchase of plant matter that no one in the household is likely to eat save perhaps the dog."

She sucked in a breath and ran her fingertips along the ruffled edges of the covers. “I will,” she said. 

Mukuro's default of cheerful, practiced cynicism, charming as it was at other times, occasionally failed to rouse Chrome's mood, particularly when his cynicism was, ever-so-accidentally, directed a little too sharply against her own personal self-improvement projects.

Her daughter would need to develop better eating habits than they ever had -- this was one such Personal Project, along with Chrome wishing to reduce sugar intake, cutting down on chocolate. She was between jobs, post-maternity, three months into the adjustment of life after swollen breasts, fitful sleep, a rhythm of little body pains from the child's crying and the child's mouth.

Lying in bed, in its fearsome comfort, realizing that her spirit/body had always been (in some part) a vessel in service of others, and thus this transition was nothing new, she propped herself up on the pillow and combed her hair, watching Mukuro with her good eye as he sat at the computer, typing.

"She's in REM sleep," Mukuro started again, casually changing the subject (aware, perhaps, of Chrome's slight nuances of reaction).

He laughed softly, in his lilting way, biting at the fingernail of his thumb, arms crossed, as he waited for something to load on the screen. "I attempted to add imagery to her dream, as I once did for you, but she blanked my efforts out into darkness. Do you know that an infant's subconsciousness is not very exciting? It'll only be a matter of time before ponies, cartoons, or horror supplant her... endless miasma of half-formed kaleidoscopic vaguery, I suppose."

"What were your dreams... back then?"

"Ponies, cartoons, or horror?" He cast a glance back, raising an eyebrow and propping one arm against his knee.

"Yes," Chrome said.

"All of the above, naturally."

"I thought that."

She proceeded with her first soft smile of the morning.

"I consider it a study," he went on, unperturbed. "Dreams, you know."

"You always say that."

"Because everything is a study in something. Naturally, there's a reason I'm the finest strategist in -- "

"-- Vongola?"

Mukuro scoffed. "I don't associate with them."

"Okay," she said. "And -- having an unethical relationship with your protege?"

"I suppose I am. That is how we're viewed abroad, for those who know anything at all." He said it almost proudly. "But not so unethical as that -- _association_ between Hibari Kyouya and Dino Cavallone."

Chrome stretched her arms above her head and stepped out of the bed, pausing to lean against the back of the chair where Mukuro was sitting. He, meanwhile, returned his gaze to his operation in progress. 

Perhaps today Chrome would receive a call about a job. The networks of Vongola had distributed her resume. She was, officially, finished with maternity leave. Contract work, reconnaissance, even translation -- there was a good market for translation right now. I-pin, whom she sometimes hired (along with, some would say ironically, Lambo) for babysitting, had dropped leads, given that she herself was now a part-time college student, part-time ramen saleswoman, part-time Chinese-Japanese translator, and occasional babysitter.

It was a wonder teenagers these days could manage such schedules, but then again, Chrome thought, remembering her own youth --

Neuilly, when eventually roused and taken from her crib, responded promptly by batting an arm, grabbing a fistful of her mother's hair, and tugging with all the strength a three-month old could muster. She burbled, "ah"-ed, and stared, alert-eyed.

"She's become very -- grabby," Chrome observed.

"As opposed to her previous state of dormancy punctuated by volcanic bursts of hair-raising, soul-crushing crying?"

"Yes, that."

He laughed. Ruefully. "I don't claim to understand the workings of miniature human beings. She does keep trying to engage me in a staring contest. And apparently is of the opinion that I and all other things appear delightful to eat."

Miniature human beings, he affirmed, held some measure of appeal in their ease of accepting absolute nonsense.

At three months, her toy collection possessed a Mukurou-owl-decorated plastic teether which she chewed in between intermittent smiles, drool, and thumb nibblings, as well as a play gym (sometimes expanded by illusions, when one or the other parent felt creative), a mobile, and a rattle hollowed out from Fran's old box weapon in the shape of Belphegor, which shook and made ridiculous noises when the infant grasped it.

Mukuro found this particular toy to be unbelievably tacky, disgusting, and typical of Fran's gift ideas, but the child, clearly having not inherited his discerning tastes, approved of and baby-giggled gleefully at as soon as she had begun fine-tuning the art of baby-giggling.

She had become increasingly vocal in non-terrible (read: as opposed to crying, wrinkle-faced in the middle of the night) ways, so some blessing was to be had. She still attached herself, with all eagerness, to her mother's nipple, and Chrome would stare, placidly, and Mukuro would resist the instinctive upswelling of hives.

Chrome was the strangest human being, even with his patient influence.

She was smiling wanly, and she brushed a strand of hair behind her ear, hoisting her daughter to the most comfortable position and continuing to stand there, all soft lines, waves of hair, large eye, heart-shaped face, clear skin, white gown, everything constructed-feminine, but entirely without artifice or illusion. 

Except: That, of course, was the most superior illusion of all. Skin and bones and lace.

For someone who had a penchant at varying times in his own life for removing others' teeth, thereby horrifying dentists everywhere, and sporadically stabbing his own eyeball, really, who was he to criticize Chrome's newfound discovery for body horror? Yes, she seemed unusually happy about the process, as so many human mothers did, but such was Chrome's prerogative.

"I'm going ... " she said again, "... and I'm leaving her here... "

"I will provide sufficient entertainment for the both of us," Mukuro said, not looking up again. " _I have no doubt._ "


	2. gods and monsters

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have another chapter of this fic that's almost done. I'll be posting it very soon (like in a day or two). Until then, I thought I'd go ahead and toss this up.

It was sometime after Gokudera's fierce proclamations had been made that Sawada Tsunayoshi stood on his own lawn, casting vaguely interested glances in the direction of his neighbour's household. 

Gokudera Hayato and Yamamoto Takeshi, as in all things, rallied behind Tsuna. Yamamoto's attention was diverted by one text message from Hibari Kyouya, one from Reborn, a baseball game app on his phone, and the motions of the sea birds in the blue noon sky. The last of these was relevant to his complicated physical calculations, to new sword techniques. 

Yamamoto, the stories went, was eligible for the major leagues, and might soon confirm a contract that could lead him across the globe. For now, he was characteristically modest, laughing off any such reports as, "Really? Well, that'd be something. But I couldn't accept if it would take me away from Tsuna when he needed me." Usually accompanied by some further comment about being the right hand man, thus evoking Gokudera's ire.

But this is all another, secondary story.

The truth was, in as much as Gokudera and Yamamoto did rally behind Tsuna, implicitly pushing him towards an action of some indeterminate kind, Tsuna would rather they have _returned inside_ , seeing as how he had no interest in doing this. As usual, his best friends were under the happy misconception that their sojourn was his -- _Tsuna's_ \-- idea, and he was too fond of their feelings to disabuse them of that eternal, ten-years-ongoing confusion.

He heaved a small sigh. "I don't know if Rokudo Mukuro is home," he said. "Chrome's car isn't in the driveway."

"Tenth," Gokudera began, looking over at Tsuna with that hopeful, eager expression, "If Chrome's not there, then there's no reason to be too careful. I can bomb our way into Mukuro's hideout! Just give the order."

"Now, hang on just a minute -- "

"Haha, Gokudera," Yamamoto began (in that distinctive, pleasantly dismissive tone), "don't be hasty, okay? What if all the noise made the little girl cry? Chrome'd be real unhappy."

"I don't think that's the problem, Yamamoto!" 

Tsuna inhaled. 

_Good fences make good neighbours,_ goes the wisdom of an obstinate character in a certain Robert Frost poem.

Mukuro's property was a postmodern complexity of the white and the cubic -- solid low fences, sloping on the hill, high ceilings with designs suggestive of airflow above, arcing upwards. 

In the daylight, you could look down from the glass doors and see the water of the bay, thinly and transparently reflected. One or the other Mist Guardian could sometimes be seen at the doors, like a shadow. It was usually the taller of the two, often in his heavy coat, with long hair draped over one shoulder and a hand to his chin. What was it that Mukuro viewed so studiously? Tsuna would never ask.

At night, the house would appear to shift.

Panes and panels. Will-o'-the-wisps. Fogs and rolling shimmers.

Inside, during the day, all was cool and blue, and there would be Kyoko drinking tea with Chrome at the coffee table. There would be that child, whom everyone had seen born. Hadn't Tsuna held her at birth, and hadn't Kyoko cooed over the light in those eyes? You could see her intermittently, growing bigger. 

And yet the little and vast mysteries of the home remained.

~*~

Mukuro had naturally been of the opinion that any bright, blue, cirrus-and-cumulus-laden-sky of a day could only properly begin with a cheerful nod towards entertainment of his preferred variety.

Child tucked in the groove of one arm, he placed his sunglasses over his eyes, adjusted the collar of his tie, clicked the button on his keys to open the trunk, and made his way outside and across the lawn, past the garish gnomes he'd taken to occasionally volleying over to Tsunayoshi's side of the fence, beyond his garden of fly-eating flowers, through the overgrown hedges, and past two of Chrome's inexplicably-loitering tuxedo cats before finally arriving at his car.

The first matter was to deposit his spawn in the back seat's baby prison, securing her in her place directly in the middle.

The second, naturally, would be to open his trunk, in which today there was no body --

\-- but, rather, bags that were positively brimming with other assorted contraband. The pointed ends of various and sundry goods could be glimpsed tenting the white of the plastic. 

Mukuro was preparing to tug down his gloves and begin digging into _the day's adventures_ when his eyes caught sight of the shadow of movement and, looking up, he found himself presented with the visages of a certain trio of stooges (this group having not yet been made into a motion picture, though one thought it a probable modern incarnation).

Mukuro smiled thinly and tapped the rounded edge of his glasses, adjusting them as though seeking a better view.

"Sawada Tsunayoshi," he began (it was rehearsed, now -- expected). "What a _pleasure._ "

"Rokudo Mukuro," Tsuna answered, clearing his throat.

Tsuna's gaze slid towards the opened trunk.

"A visitor for -- someone came today. Uh, two visitors, actually," Tsuna continued. "I thought they might be for you."

"Door to door salesmen, I presume. How tedious. A good Vongola X would have them assassinated, you know."

"I'm not the Vongola X!" (And Mukuro chortled beneath his breath at the boorish predictability.) "Mukuro! I think they were cops, or maybe private investigators."

"It's all the same affair," Mukuro replied, not missing a beat. "If they were at your doorway, this means I successfully dodged their nosing around (naturally) and you did not. Thank you for informing me of your failure to be stealthy, however."

Mukuro sighed with unnecessary force and rolled his eyes, smile still intact, but with a faint twitch at one side of the lips. "I suppose it will be useful to my future plans. That is, the knowledge that my mafia boss of a neighbour still has not devised better distractions against the authorities, and still, apparently, asks no scrutinizing questions of them."

"You bastard!" That was Gokudera (obviously), shifting his stance defensively.

With age, he had grown taller, his hair more well-combed, his shoulders fitting into the suits he wore. He sported ash fingernail stains and the shadowy facial lines which seemed to mark several Vongola Guardians' transitions into adulthood, but alongside the more mature severity of Gokudera Hayato and Yamamoto Takeshi, a certain stubborn boyish ire remained in the first, and the emotional nuances of the second manifested primarily with the slight changes in facial expression which were beginning to appear now.

" _Don't_ talk about the Tenth that way, Mukuro!" Adding, after a second: "It's _your_ shitty self we came to help. It's _you_ who's going to end up getting your own kid hurt or worse!"

"Hey, now, Gokudera, that's -- " Yamamoto was saying, reaching around behind Tsuna as though anticipating the need to pull his partner back.

Gokudera's outburst was not without effect. Mukuro's lip curled, if momentarily. 

Then, as suddenly as it changed, his expression smoothed out again, but colder now.

"Sawada Tsunayoshi," he began anew. "When will you ever learn to collar your lapdogs?"

The ring on Gokudera's finger glinted. When Mukuro leaned forward, Gokudera met him inch for inch, an icy stare on one side and a heated gaze on the other, with Mukuro's breaths and body as silent as the shadow he was, and Gokudera drumming with adrenaline that could be heard in his heavy, aggressive breathing. 

Tsuna was too stunned to speak. It had been _years_ since his Guardians had looked so menacingly at one another, as if they might really --

Maybe it was the child or the Family aspect, Tsuna would reflect later. Gokudera couldn't stand anyone who disrupted Family or (as the two often went arm in arm) "family," lower-case f. It was a nuisance and a distraction. It put everyone at risk, including Tsuna (in Gokudera's estimation). If Chrome was not well cared for in her marital house, if Mukuro was doing something idiotically dangerous, it would filter out to all of them. It was the principle of the matter.

Gokudera, paradoxically, had always been good with children almost in spite of himself (as Lambo proved), even though he didn't actively like them (and Chrome's, he assured others, was a brat like the rest). But maybe the memories of what a certain kind of family situation could do to you were all too raw, too well-nurtured. 

Tsuna remembered, too. And when the sparks of their tempers lit the air with electricity or bomb bursts, he was already preparing to pull the two of them apart, already lunging forward to put his body between them --

These dire ruminations were broken, however, by a shrill, piercing cry that suddenly went up from the direction of the car. The sound wavered, then erupted fully: a series of wails in the signature pitch of an infant.

Apparently, the yelling had bothered her.

It was as though the situation was a balloon suddenly pricked: deflated. Mukuro drew back (almost imperceptible to the eye), clucked his tongue, and rolled his eyes behind the semi-transparent darkness of his sunglasses. Gokudera shuffled his hands in his pockets. 

"If you'll excuse me, then," Mukuro said abruptly, slamming the trunk shut and obscuring its  
contents from the collective vision of the group. "I have business to attend to. So sorry I haven't the time to turn you into garden mulch-- perhaps another day?"

"You wish," Gokudera scoffed.

"Mukuro -- " Tsuna began, but clipped his words, on watching Mukuro enter the car with the slam of another door before proceeding to adjust his rear view mirror. Half-unconsciously, Tsuna and Yamamoto approached the side of the vehicle, peering over at the infant in the backseat, who had paused in her face-scrunched frustration to stare at them with fat-wet-baby-lips and wide dark eyes. She jerked a foot in the air, vaguely batting at it. 

"She... she really is cute," Tsuna said, mildly, feeling suddenly off-kilter and absently uncomfortable, though he was hard-pressed to say why. Looking down at Chrome's child, whom she had risked so much to bring into the world, realizing that she had only at moments confided to him about the difficulties, but when she had confided, she had done so with such an earnest nature -- Chrome, Chrome ... weren't you all right now, and happy? "Be careful, please. Mukuro."

"I suppose you would think that of her," Mukuro responded ambiguously, as was his way. He sucked his breath in over his teeth, and a moment later, a pair of matching shades appeared on the child. "In any case, rest assured that you are an annoying meddler, and I couldn't care less what you believe about my life and activities."

It was, perhaps, unusually sharp in a forthright way, for a man who tended to prefer smarmy passive-aggression. One didn't need Hyper Intuition to sense a touched nerve here.

In another moment, after a sort of mock two-fingered salute, Mukuro pressed his foot to the gas and the car swung out of the driveway. He didn't so much as spare a glance backwards.

"Do you think he actually has a license or insurance?" Yamamoto asked, afterwards.

~*~

"I think," Kyoko said an hour later, "you must have hurt his feelings."

She smiled and scrunched up her nose when she said it, as if to further convey that it was a statement without malice, and she was sitting at the kitchen table paging through a new book purchase and drinking bottled water, having lately returned from the exercise center. Tsuna was sitting on the couch, hand to his cheek and temple, legs outstretched, in the posture of thought. Honestly, he had professional business that needed to be attended to, but Family came first.

"He lives recklessly. So does Chrome, in her own way," Tsuna explained.

"I think Mukuro-san is very ... " She appeared as though she was seeking a vocabulary word. Her face became intensely focused on this inward reflection, whatever it might be. Kyoko, as it would never cease to amaze Tsuna, was beautiful when her mind lit upon something and that sort of innocent concentration overtook her; the daylight haloed her, warm and receptive, the ideal mediator even when she was expressing her gentle admonishment. 

"Awful?" Tsuna tried.

"You're both very stubborn, Tsu-kun. Reborn-san still says no one can make you accept something if you'd prefer not to... "

"That's only because Reborn wants me to lay claim to crazy and dangerous titles!"

"Mukuro-san has a strong will of his own," Kyoko was continuing.

"The man is incapable of self-reflection, Kyoko."

"Mm, well, I think he likes you . . . so he probably would be _touchy_ about what you and your friends think."

"Are you kidding? Kyoko . . . "

"Oh, Tsu-kun. I could be wrong," she demurred (in a tone that suggested she didn't really think she was wrong at all, but was feeling diplomatic). She stretched her arms, one and then the other, and then glided the conversation towards something related-but-different: "I saw Chrome-chan at the grocery store today. She was making a face at the plants."

So, that's where she had been. Surprising to hear that she wasn't purchasing wheat chocolate. It was undeniable that the Chrome Tsuna had known had begun to change. He thought a moment, then said, "She seemed happy, though?"

"Yes, I think so. I'm sure she's happy. But -- "

"But what?"

"I think... she has a lot on her mind... oh, I don't know, Tsu-kun. It's hard to say with Chrome-chan."

 _You're telling me,_ he thought. But Kyoko did have a certain kind of understanding of people on another level; he trusted that her judgments reflected at least a reading of reality which was not entirely untrue if the universe were tipped sideways and viewed from another angle. Which was to say, she was accurate towards some details that others couldn't see, while leaving a generous helping of the remainder of reality by the wayside. Mukuro liked him? Only Kyoko and perhaps Chrome would say things like that. 

_But he moved near you,_ Kyoko would say, and shrug, still smiling.

"Well," Kyoko said, "I hope Gokudera-kun and Mukuro-san make up, and... I hope everyone will get along. Everyone fights sometimes. Gokudera-kun and Mukuro-san have bad tempers. But I'm sure everyone wants the best for everyone else."

And what, really, would life be without Kyoko's unbelievable optimism?

~*~

Chrome had learned to say _I love you_ in human languages.

Italian, she learned from Mukuro. And she had practiced with him. In Japanese, she had always known the words, but learning to say them was a life long process. I love you, Mukuro-sama. She would recite it in her head before giving life to the words, which would shiver on her tongue before emerging, full and clear, and her body would smile as it had learned to do. 

He had taught her that, and those words in the language to which he was born. She had been in love with him since a time when memory began to erode at the edges, as if her life prior to him was a dream forgotten upon waking.

Now, Neuilly was an anomaly. A new addition to their unit. Accepted by father and mother, but with a desperate sort of fear attached. Neuilly, Chrome's baby, was an object of terror.

Mukuro, it could be said, had never acknowledged her as _his child_. Not in so many words. She was always the girl, the infant, the miniature human from Chrome's uterus, or, most often, simply "her," with the pronoun's antecedent being implicitly understood between the two of them.

No one ever asked Mukuro why he behaved like that. Not even Chrome. She knew his answer: it hardly mattered what he referred to her as so long as one understood to whom he referred, yes?

And yet, Chrome thought, the child _was his_ , just as she, Ken, Chikusa, and even M.M. and Fran were. And Mukuro was theirs, too. Chrome would not press him into speaking in a manner which seemed to be uncomfortable for him. She knew he had his reasons (as she, so often, had hers). So Mukuro spoke of the child as if she were something which had emerged, spontaneously, from within Chrome, as if he were an outsider in the business of production. Chrome accepted this.

And yet, in practical matters, Mukuro was an adept caretaker. He always had been. Ken and Chikusa could have told you that, for they too had been raised by and alongside him, with minimal adult supervision.

Chrome was also afraid. 

Outwardly, she was the less fatalistic of the two, the more loving, and now -- freed of the burdensome solitude of her youth, which still hung painfully in her posture and her eye, at certain moments -- the more happy of the duo, but Chrome's was terror of another kind.

The bomb they had disarmed in Hibari-san's mission. The gunshot wound she acquired at sixteen (mercifully, only her shoulder had been torn through, and Chrome had quickly cut a sheaf of cloth from her uniform, applied a tourniquet to the injury, and finished her fight). The time Chrome had once returned to Kokuyo and found a folded death threat in one of her boots. 

She had sleuthed out the culprit, an older man from a nondescript Family who had taken to following Chrome after learning of the existence of a female version of Rokudo Mukuro. He was behind bars now, in one of the lesser Vendicare cells, but when Chrome had inspected his quarters to confiscate her enemy's weapons, she had come across an entire room of furniture carved to look like the bodies of women. Women's wigs. Eyeless white mannequin faces on the walls. A computer filled with pornography of underage girls.

And this was the world which Chrome had seen. Being ambushed, stabbed, shot, stalked -- they would touch her in passing on the train, if she did not slip through their fingers as mist (which she had learned to do very well). The object of creepy fetishes. Rape and death threats.

Mukuro had his share, too. More of the latter than Chrome, certainly, although he also took them in far greater stride.

"I've died too many times for it to be of consequence," he would say, or:

"Having faced the Vendici, I hardly see that anyone else should pose any especial challenge. Houdini's feats would be as nothing before those chains in that place..."

Or even, "Well, perhaps this one would prove a more interesting opponent than Hibari Kyouya... though it's doubtful, isn't it?"

Chrome did not know whether she hated or envied him in those moments, talking as if he took his life for granted.

They are illusionists, and this is the illusion:

A household next to Boss (safety purposes, the comfort of the familiar). A family. A dog. A downy baby, three months old. Chrome in her puffy white night gown, worrying about her child's fever or a grocery list, and thinking, maybe, outside, in the darkness -- a knife, a gun, a box weapon, a sniper's eye, anthrax waiting to be mailed to her in an envelope.

Oh God, please let this illusion be real. It was all she wanted, all she asked for. If they could just be the Family Next Door to To Tsuna and Kyoko, the pretty couple, with a little mail box.

Boss would make everything all right, wouldn't he? He would. And how could evil exist in a world with Kyoko's smile? The others would be nearby. They were always visiting. No one could overcome the entire strength of Vongola.

"Life as an herbivore doesn't suit you," Hibari had told her once, after the move, after their last mission together. "Why do you pretend?"

Chrome had worked at least light jobs throughtout most of her pregnancy. Scouting missions with Fuuta. Information-gathering. She had touched her abdomen, one of the few times she did so, and realized she had no immediate answer.

Mukuro did.

"Because you're an illusionist," he murmured into her ear, later, his hands threading her hair into a loose ponytail, touching her shoulders. "And what better illusion is there than domesticity?"

"An illusionist who falls for their illusion is lost," she answered. His own words, once.

"You did learn well," Mukuro said. He reserved the occasional compliment for her success. She was not his student any longer. She hadn't been for several years.

Chrome had never fallen for the illusion. Not so long as she kept at her work. But for three blissful, painful-at-night months of transition, for three months of rising in the morning to see Mukuro asleep, beautifully asleep, as well as the child, the two of them both lying there such that she could reach out and touch their eyelids with filaments of Mist... for that time, Chrome could be happy, and pretend, and love, which was after all no illusion at all. And this she had to believe. Her feelings for them were the one constant in this world, the one truth over which she could pinch herself and know for a fact.

~*~

When Chrome arrived home that afternoon with grocery bags in tow, she sensed immediately that the atmosphere of the household was amiss.

It was quiet. Chrome had learned to feel out the nuances of the silences. This was a _halting_ silence. Tense, somehow. But was it angry? Or simply infused with a note of avoidance, the desire to pull away from the world -- as they must do sometimes?

She paused, waiting, then closed her eye and opened her arms, parting the mist that hung so fine and white about the shadowy insides of the household. 

Mukuro possessed certain old habits which died hard. When outside in daylight or out and about in public, he did not seem to mind sun and artificial glow, but in his _own_ abode, he kept his thinking-spaces (necessary for the formulation of Every Evil Scheme) cool and dark. Partially-shuttered windows, partially-drawn curtains, filtered outdoor light.

Most of the rooms in the house owed their interior lighting to high studio lights which focused ghostly white on a particular patch of space and otherwise left the rooms shadowy blue -- an interior of dusk. Mukuro was comfortable like that, Chrome had found.

For her part, she didn't mind it. Sometimes it was almost like Mukuro became more real, more tangible, more starkly lined and somehow honest (bodily) in the darkness. He had been real at the dim theatre of Kokuyo and fictitious in the bright place he created for Chrome when they met. Perhaps these memories lent a bias that made him most palpable in the shadows, where he could rest, and close his eyes in sleep. That was when he became a living thing.

Neuilly was not in her crib. Rather, she was seated atop a pile of fuzzy blankets on the carpet. Mukuro bloomed lotuses in the air; the baby's tiny, frond-curling fingers reached outwards, touching the tips. As Chrome looked on, the edges of the flowers peeled away. Something into nothing. 

"Is she . . . " Chrome hesitated.

Mukuro smirked. "Quite amateur work. It's not so much _reshaping_ my creations as it is undoing them."

"But she's affecting the illusions," Chrome said.

"Indeed." He added, after a moment, "Is this any surprise?"

Chrome stood where she was. Unmoving. "Did you and Boss -- "

The way his face changed, if minutely: yes, she knew she had the right assumption. Mukuro-sama had always been so easy to read when it came to certain moods (at least, Chrome thought so).

"He has an uncanny talent for meddling in my affairs. Never mind, though. Have you received any calls?"

"About a job?"

"Concerning that topic, yes."

"Ah, um. No. Not yet." With Mukuro having turned his attention towards Chrome, Baby and the dog were now licking one another's faces. Chrome pointed, absently. "That's -- "

Mukuro side-eyed the exchange. "Ah, it appears Ken's visits are having an effect."

Shooing the dog away worked momentarily, but an instant later, he was back -- with the baby staring into space and extending her face (apparently reflexively) such that the animal could have a better licking angle. Neuilly was all blank glazed eyes and fat cheeks and an occasional exclaimed "buh" as he wagged his tail and slobbered amicably onto her skin.

"What a mysterious creature she is," Mukuro said, encircling an arm about her and sliding her away again. "To neither give out nor comprehend her own motives in anything she does."

"I want her to be happy... but... I don't know..." Chrome scrunched her nose. Were dogs and babies supposed to do that? 

Maybe Boss would know.


	3. a far cry from a nativity scene

Let us not forget how it came to pass that the child was born.

Chrome, as a matter of course, would under no circumstance allow herself to be transported to the hospital. Tsuna could not blame her. After the many unfortunate incidences in their youth, Chrome and Mukuro had developed an intense aversion to hospitals. Unfortunately, they also had an intense aversion to many other commonly held aspects of existing as human beings, such as birth certificates, real names, documents of citizenship, IDs, and so forth. The Family needed to wheedle and cajole to see to it that the baby had anything like formal, social recognition of her existence.

When Chrome's water broke and her contractions began, they were not strenuous, and she walked with Fuuta and I-pin for a couple of hours. She also took a warm bath and relaxed herself.

As the birth progressed, _everyone_ from the extended Family arrived in increments, and Chrome began to have that startled-rabbit look that suggested she wanted to bolt out the nearest window, only she was incapable of doing so due to the requirement of having to push a live human being out of her (possibly illusory or partially illusory) uterus.

In the beginning, Kyoko and Tsuna were instrumental in coaxing Chrome to stop wandering about her kitchen, where she was looking to busy herself unnecessarily, and lie down. By then, she was wincing with strain, but still muttering (in her small voice), "I have to -- I, oh... "

"I was trying to get that sleazy old man doctor on the phone," Gokudera was saying (mostly to Tsuna), after Chrome had finally allowed herself to be escorted to the bed. "But his voicemail says he's in the Caribbean 'examining' the locals... " Out of nervous habit, he pushed his hand through his hair with the customary "che."

"No doctors," Chrome said.

"Where the hell is Mukuro?" he continued. "What kind of asshole wouldn't be here at a time like this?" And then, almost as an after-thought, a brief glance in Chrome's direction: "No offense... I guess..." 

The words sounded grudging and chewed upon, but really, Vongola's Storm Guardian was supposed to be on his most cordial and least temperamental behaviour for the occasion -- and he was, for him. Normally, Mukuro flaws and general, all-purpose douchebaggery would've prompted a much greater rant.

"It'll be all right, Gokudera -- right, Chrome?" 

That was Yamamoto, looking down at her with the utmost faith. Boss and Kyoko-san on one side, Yamamoto on the other, and their expressions were so sweet, so blurred and haloed by the stress of the moment, that Chrome found herself feeling stiff and wet-eyed with emotion.

"I'll cheer for you -- all the way to home base," Yamamoto said, raising his fist triumphantly.

At first, Gokudera and, to a lesser extent, Tsuna, looked upon him as though he had said something insane. Gokudera added, "You baseball idiot! This isn't a fucking _game_!"

"Remember the Guardian huddle?" Yamamoto continued, undaunted. "Chrome said 'I don't need that' when we first met her . . . but that was years ago, you know? Haha. Maybe it'd be different now."

Gokudera eyed Yamamoto.

Tsuna eyed Kyoko, Gokudera, Yamamoto, and Chrome in turn, and then, with that hesitant, perplexed smile he had perfected through time and many uses, Tsuna said, "Well, Chrome... what do you think?"

Chrome swallowed. From the way her lip trembled and her gaze flitted, you'd really think she was going to cry, but it must have just been the exertions of labour, advancing ever more quickly now. "... All right," she said.

It was an awkward-looking huddle, but worth it. They had to lean down to accommodate Chrome, who was lying in bed in the center of the room. Yamamoto, Tsuna, Gokudera, and Kyoko -- she was part of the Family, if not a Guardian. She belonged. Chrome winced, and Yamamoto fist bumped her -- she, haltingly, fist bumped back, although she looked at his hand as if it might grow fangs and attack. That was just Chrome.

"Thank you," she said in her tiny voice. "Thank you..."

Gokudera's expression softened, if barely. He was beginning to regret that he had given up smoking during the days of Millefiore and that first future. "Good grief, what a pain in the ass," he muttered, but, more audibly, "I'll see if I can get someone else on the phone. In the meanwhile, I remember a few things from that old bastard's practice. Baseball freak, are you listening?" A jerking, thumb-pointing backwards towards the door: "Come on. We need to get... towels. Lots of fucking _towels._ "

_At least._

~*~

Labour, as it happens, can in some instances require a considerable amount of time to bring to completion. Twelve hours at the long end of the spectrum. Occasionally even more than that.

Fairly early in, Chrome had been making faces and saying things like, "It feels like I need to -- " And gesturing in the direction of the hallway -- to which Gokudera, hunched studiously over a book on the science of childbirth, was saying the words, "extreme rectal pressure" in an unfazed, furiously-getting-to-the-bottom-of-the-mystery tone of voice.

" _Can occur during transition,_ " Gokudera concluded, not looking up. Tsuna blushed awkwardly and furiously, because, wow, this was a conversation he had never dreamt he'd be participating in or even listening to.

It didn't help that, by that time, Lambo had joined the other Guardians in Chrome's house, and every now and then he would switch out with his younger self (who, in younger self timeline, must have been up to some mischief with the Ten Year Bazooka), and five-year-old Lambo would proceed to scream "Poo! Poo!" in response to their serious _extreme rectal pressure_ -related conversations, as well as hopping into the pan of hot water that had been brought out to sterilize the kit of instruments.

 _L-Lambo, stop!_ Tsuna had exclaimed. Eventually, Yamamoto managed to gather him into his arms. A few minutes later, Lambo had returned to his fifteen-year-old self. As a point of proper faux-dandy decorum, Lambo adjusted his clothing, cocked his head, closed one eye, and said, "If it would be necessary to escort Miss Dokuro to the bathroom -- "

"She can walk on her own, asshole," Gokudera retorted. "She's having a damn baby, not dying."

"Don't you think that should be up to Chrome?" Yamamoto put in.

"Yamamoto's right," Tsuna added. "Chrome . . . "

When he put his hand near Chrome, she took it gratefully, and he looked down at her with an expression of concern, wiping her sweaty forehead with the other hand.

If he allowed himself to be honest, he had too many questions about this whole scenario. One: Where the hell was Mukuro? Why would he not be here now of all times? Two: Why had Chrome invited Tsuna (and, by extension, Kyoko and the other Vongola members)? Specifically, why had they been invited as if, implicitly, they were to oversee this affair? Friends being present to wait for a baby was one thing. Friends _delivering_ it was quite another.

And Chrome, for all that she had co-purchased a house (somehow), decorated it, and planned for her child, did not appear to have done _anything_ to set up the actual event of the birth.

Really, there were probably many explanations at work here, but the only short and immediately transparent answer -- even if it was merely a partial conclusion towards some larger story -- was that this was a bout of what could best be termed exasperating Mist Guardian shenanigans.

Chrome had not done what other human beings would do because Chrome. Mukuro was not doing what other human beings would do because Mukuro.

Tsuna could not ask Chrome why any of this was happening the way it was because she was busy, exhausted, apparently stressed, mentally preoccupied, and also because Chrome. Wresting a straight answer from her would be like herding cats. Tsuna exhaled and, when Chrome said that she did indeed want to walk to the bathroom, please, he reached beneath her shoulder and helped her to her feet.

Why were his Guardians so difficult sometimes?

At around that time, Bianchi came through the doors (in goggles, naturally) and announced that Dino Cavallone gave Chrome Dokuro's child the well wishes of the Cavallone family, but his men were detaining him from attending the event -- namely because the room was probably too small (and now far too crowded) for them to remain nearby, and no one wished for the infant to have a premature death from flying spiky objects or oversized turtles who had somehow become splashed with the hot water (perhaps by baby cows screaming about poo, proving Romario had excellent foresight). Or both.

Bianchi, however, seemed pleased about this occasion, and in her laconic, dreamy way, she mused, "I didn't have the opportunity to see Hayato's mother give birth to him. My first memory of you, Hayato, was when I was three years old and held you in my arms."

She clasped her hands and swooned at the memory.

"You dropped me," Gokudera said, flatly. "If you weren't so short back then, I'd be dead! Anyway, don't even think about trying to offer Chrome any . . . any _maternity entrees!_ "

"The most recent baby I worked with was Reborn," Bianchi continued (apparently not hearing him), "and ours was a truly memorable love."

"Uh, I don't think that's the kind of love most parents want for their children, Bianchi!" Tsuna declared. "In any case -- has anyone been able to contact a midwife?"

"I may be able to help you with Miss Dokuro . . . " And now it was I-pin, returning from outside and helping Chrome back to her bed. Her body language was so sweetly awkward, so eager to please, all fluttery-wringing hands and grasping at her apron (it was still a ramen delivery day, and she was between shifts) -- you would never guess that she could defeat a dojo of men on instinct. "I've had some practice in midwifery. My old master wanted me to be well-rounded."

"That's... that's wonderful," Tsuna said. She sure was well-rounded, indeed.

"In my practice, we encouraged the baby to learn martial arts in the womb, so if there was a breech birth, she could kick her way out . . . they say I came out kicking, but of course I don't really remember . . . " 

She was laughing and waving her hand, conveying her modesty and shyness.

All right. So I-pin was also out of the question.

"The key to women is in understanding their heart's desires and treating them gently, Vongola," said Lambo, who proceeded to stand alongside his teenaged companion (who had turned away from him and was persistently ignoring his presence, probably still unintentionally undermining his words in her quest to teach babies uterine kung fu). "That being said . . . " Something that might have been a shudder passed through him. "Sometimes a man must excuse himself."

"The ranking planet tells me that -- " Fuuta pointed at I-pin and Lambo. " -- those two are ranked #1 most likely to reproduce next. And #3 most likely to have an out-of-wedlock pregnancy."

"Who're the first two?" Yamamoto asked, propping his chin in his hand as he sat beside the bed.

"Hayato-nii and Miura-nee are #1."

" _What? We're not even --_ "

"--if they were still doing 'that,'" Fuuta amended. His eyes had taken on that distant look associated with the voice of the ranking planet. "It would only be a matter of time before it happened. You know it's true, Hayato-nii. Bianchi-nee and Takeshi-nii are #2 . . . "

Yamamoto laughed awkwardly as Gokudera shot him a vicious glare. "You. And my sister."

"Sure was an unexpected result," Yamamoto said.

"It's been years since that happened, Hayato," Bianchi added, indifferently.

"Fran-san and Bluebell-chan would be #1 if you count teenage pregnancies and other teams . . . "

 _"Guys,_ " Tsuna said. "A-as interesting --" (horrifying) "-- as this discussion is, shouldn't we be thinking about helping Chrome?" He pointed. 

"I'm fine," Chrome said in her small voice. She was lying through her teeth, naturally. Actually, she was wincing in strain and making little moaning noises.

Gokudera had no choice, really, but to return to his frantic reading.

~*~

These were the facts: Vongola could not, anywhere, find a midwife on short notice. Not in the area, and when it came to flying someone over from elsewhere in Japan, Chrome declined the implied expense (even if the bill would fall to Tsuna, not her).

She also continued to decline hospitals, insisting that she was "fine," and that it was a natural labour -- which it probably was, but in what way were any of them equipped for the process of assisting her?

Towels, hot water, Chrome breathing heavily and shaking her head no or nodding her head yes at Tsuna's various questions.

Kyoko walked into the room at one point and announced, "Tsu-kun, Auntie just called. Your father says he'll be sure to have beer for the baby, and Auntie told us congratulations on our having a child. They're _such_ kidders..."

Tsuna slapped his forehead. "Mom and Dad aren't allowed here," he definitively declared.

Really, what they needed was the help of Hana, or someone sensible and well-grounded like that. But, upon Tsuna's raising the idea, Kyoko promptly reminded her husband that Hana could not for the life of her tolerate _babies_. This entire experience would make her break out in hives and possibly die.

Too many other people showed up. Some of them were unexpected. Squalo was yelling to Yamamoto that slicing Chrome open and finding someone to sew her back up appeared to be a good idea (this after four hours of labour -- WAS THAT FUCKING BABY COMING OUT OR NOT, as he'd asked), and Yamamoto was saying, _haha, hey now, not so hasty_.

Levi was banned from the occasion for reasons of partial female nudity being at hand and his inability not to hit on people when such a situation presented itself, and Belphegor was banned for reasons of past bad blood with Chrome, even though he insisted that _"shishishi it was aaaaages ago,"_ and Lussuria, for that matter, was banned on behalf of general creepiness, but Mammon and Fran were present. Mammon's suggestion was to pull the baby out of Chrome via tentacle monster. "I'm gracious enough to accept cash upfront," he noted.

"No, thank you," Chrome said.

"Our 'shitty Boss' --" (Squalo's title, but Fran delivered it without inflection or emotion) "--can't make it because he's napping. But he did send you a card."

The card read: _Enjoy your shitty marriage and die. Trash._

"I guess some people aren't good with remembering special occasions," Fran went on. "If you and Master ever get married, though -- they say it's the thought that counts."

Of course, there were certain surprisingly absent figures who had not made it to the birth. Reborn, for one. Tsuna had sought his guidance, because really, Reborn was good at everything, even babies. After all, he had _been_ a baby during the most significant era of Tsuna's life. And Reborn had experience with Luce and her pregnancy, too. He was there for her during that time. If anyone could understand, Reborn could. 

But Reborn, though he had sent Chrome his well wishes, insisted that this was Tsuna's mission. 

If Vongola Tenth was unable to look after his Family in an hour of need such as this one, then what kind of leader was he? Help Chrome have her child yourself, stupid Tsuna. 

(Tsuna had protested that he was _not_ Vongola X! _And what kind of crazy tutor treated something like this as 'training'!_ )

Haru, too, had been unable to come for the occasion (on account of being overseas), and the room was already too crowded for Millefiore or Shimon to make an appearance. Chrome couldn't handle that much of a gathering.

By the time Ken and Chikusa arrived, slouching and sullen-faced as ever, Chrome was looking more alert, more aware and accepting. Gokudera and Ken nearly got into a fistfight (in Chrome's self-made delivery room, indeed) when Gokudera demanded to know where the _hell_ was Mukuro and why was he such an asshole and a God-fucking-awful father, too.

"Chikusa," Chrome said. "He's -- "

"After what you suggested, I thought so," Chikusa agreed, pushing his glasses up his nose.

Tsuna caught that fragment of conversation and peered at them curiously, but he couldn't make heads or tails of it. There were other utterances, equally vague and mysterious: "he was upset" (Chikusa: nonchalantly), "I was sorry I..." (Chrome) "is it all right?" (Chikusa) "it is now" (Chrome) "but you and Ken..." (Chrome) "we're well..." (Chikusa).

Kokuyo business was, since the dawn of time, Kokuyo business, but the way they were speaking with such agitation, and Chrome _speaking_ at all -- it was something else to listen to. Attempt to listen to, rather. Tsuna was not going to ask, but he gathered that something alarming had occurred in the recent past. A disagreement, maybe?

"Chrome." Chikusa looked down. "You're dilated."

" _Ugh_ ," Ken said. "Look at that shit. Makes me glad I never got a girlfriend."

"That's why you didn't," Chikusa said.

Ken had come bearing gifts of chocolate puffs for Chrome. Their presence was like that of the three wise men, perhaps. Except there were two, and neither would lay claim to wisdom, and they were bringing chocolate puffs and yo-yos rather than myrrh, frankincense, and gold. So, really, not all that similar. All of a sudden, Chrome began pushing much harder: _visibly_ so, and panting with the effort.

At that moment, the door _exploded_ and one Sasagawa Ryohei burst into the room, yelling at the top of his lungs, "DOKURO-SAN! PUSH TO THE EXTREME! BABY-SAN, PUNCH YOUR WAY OUT OF DOKURO-SAN WITH EXTREME FORCE!"

Tsuna felt a cold sweat, Kyoko grinned from ear to ear, and before Gokudera could threaten Ryohei with imminent explosive doom, Hibari stepped into the room behind him and casually tripped him (as Ryohei ran, mid-charge) to the ground. There was a resounding _crash_. Tsuna cringed. Yamamoto laughed. 

"Hibari-san," Tsuna said.

Hibari bared his tonfa.

"Herbivores who crowd -- "

Oh, no. It was _that_ look on his face.

" -- will be bitten to death."

"N-no, Hibari-san, wait! You can't, in here!" Tsuna looked back at Chrome, suddenly frantic.

To his surprise, Chrome appeared not at all bothered. Maybe even slightly relieved -- over Hibari's threats of imminent death to everyone in the vicinity. 

Terrible, or understandable? Even Tsuna could not answer that question. But it was ultimately moot, as Chrome spoke for herself, and the tense moment passed.

"Hibari-san," she repeated. "Hello."

"Dokuro."

"Thank you for bringing him," Chrome said.

Hibari closed his eyes. "I didn't 'bring' him."

"Indeed, he didn't. He was merely a -- how shall we say? Happy sport, along the way."

All eyes turned to Mukuro as he entered the bedroom behind Hibari.

"Staring is impolite, you know," Mukuro said, chuckling -- not meeting anyone's gaze besides Chrome's, as he looked above and beyond everyone gathered. "Well, now. I hope I didn't miss the grand finale."

~*~

When M.M. entered a few paces behind Mukuro, thus bringing all of Kokuyo together, Fran remarked, with his characteristic verbal indifference, "Wow, Master -- it's like that story where the evil witch arrives to curse the day and make everyone sleep," and M.M. shouted, "Shut up, you idiot!" and thrashed him over his hat-covered head with her purse.

She huffed. "You're so immature, Fran. I can't believe it."

Whatever response Gokudera had, upon seeing Mukuro and his entourage come together, he bit back -- bit down, swallowing hard, with only a loud and forceful exhale to give you an idea of what he was thinking. Tsuna, standing beside his right hand man, put forth his arms as though to create an artificial barrier -- arms outstretched in a plea for peace, in greeting, and in confusion.

Mukuro spared only one fleeting glance across the length of the room, turning in a semi-circle to survey the crowd. 

"What a menagerie we have here today," he murmured, and then crossed the space to stand before Chrome.

"Rokudo Mukuro," Tsuna said, "Where were you?"

"Plotting to drown the world in a sea of blood, one naturally assumes," Mukuro said, with a shrug. "Now don't interrupt me. Ah -- " Crouching before the space of interest. " -- dear Chrome, you're doing the right thing, if only you would push a little harder."

She did. In fact, she was red-faced, squinting and heaving from the effort, when she gasped, "I can't. No, thank you. It can stay inside . . . I can't . . ."

That, of course, paradoxically meant she was on the exhausted final leg, and Mukuro, snapping on medical gloves to replace the usual black leather, took one look in front of himself, chuckled, and reached upwards and inside, beneath the sheets -- in a movement too quick for Tsuna to follow or make sense of -- and his hands seemed to twist, emerging with something that first appeared round, dark, purplish, then white (and with _protrusions_ that a mind realized, incrementally, to be arms and legs, fingers and toes), and then the Something was moving, kicking and making noise.

"That's... another person," Tsuna said.

"The famed Vongola talent for observation never fails to impress." Mukuro's expression turned wry, once again briefly. "Go on. Hand me a towel."

Afterwards, when the newborn had been cleaned and separated, umbilical cord cut, Chrome held her, looking very pale, very drowsy. She had murmured "thank you" beneath her breath when the child was passed into her arms, then she became quiet, and then, a little later, she was whispering anxiously about all the people around. There were so many people, and --

"That they saw me do _that_ ," she was whispering, and Tsuna understood. He and Kyoko took it upon themselves to begin gently shuffling people out, but not before Chrome offered him an opportunity to hold her child.

And that was how Tsuna ended up outside of the bedroom, vaguely dazed, holding a blanketed sleeping baby whose parents every so often seemed to dematerialize in time and space, as if this weight in his hands were the sole and concrete proof of their existence in the moment. Which was a crazy thought, but Chrome was behind the door, resting, and Mukuro -- but where now? And it was as though the curtain had been pulled aside just for today, just for a little while, to see this strange human spectacle.

"An abomination," Hibari said, nudging the blanket ever-so-gently with the end of the tonfa. "But if taught Namimori discipline, it might be passable."

"She sure is so cute!" Kyoko was exclaiming. "That is one pretty girl."

"The fuck was that," Gokudera said (of the day in summary, one assumed).

"She looks a lot like Chrome," Yamamoto pitched in, peering puppy-eager down at the child. "Although I guess she looks like Mukuro, too."

"That's because they look a hell of a lot alike in the first place, you idiot."

"AW, YEAH, I AM GOING TO TEACH THIS BABY EXTREME BEAR FIGHTING!" Ryohei announced, eyes shining.

"Uh... uh! Big Brother, I really don't think that's necessary!" Tsuna looked down at the baby, then up again warily. She stirred and gave an irritated cry. If you studied her face, her large eyes -- she really did resemble Chrome, but much smaller and somewhat balder.

"Che." Gokudera was eyeing the child strangely, suspiciously, as if she were a chemical equation or a math problem or some new challenge demanding scrutiny in an evaluation. "What... do you even do with something like this? Seems kind of boring. Do you have any ingenious plans for her for the Vongola, Tenth?"

"What? _Of course I don't._ "

"I can prepare a training program, then. Just like Reborn did for us." He was winking and showing his raised fist. "I think kids are annoying as hell, but for the Tenth and the Family, I'm sure it'll be worth it, and as your right hand, I insist!"

"That's not what I meant at all!"

"I told you he was #1-ranked most likely to become a kindergarten teacher," Fuuta observed.

"I'll help," Yamamoto added, "seeing as I'm Tsuna's right hand."

And the predictable breakdown into chaos ensued. Eventually, however, Lambo noted that he would not forego any opportunities to play with the child or teach her to follow his lead (Tsuna: "That's what I'm afraid of!"), I-pin offered her services in ramen preparation skills, babysitting, and the possibility that she might accidentally pass on the art of beating up rooms of people without intending to, Bianchi insisted she would see to it that this baby would be well-fed and would learn how to be a splendid cook (Tsuna noted this so as to make the necessary warnings to Chrome), and Squalo just chipped in on his way out to say that he hoped _that crazy fucker's_ kid at least grew up to "fucking murder" everyone present and accounted for. Particularly Yamamoto, though, since it just seemed right to wish death most thoroughly on his own charge. Yamamoto laughed and thanked his erstwhile teacher for keeping him in his thoughts.

So that left Kokuyo.

There they were, standing in the hall, but keeping their distance from Tsuna's associates, and looking predictably anti-social and unpleasant. Ken was scowling, Chikusa hunched over, Fran appeared curiously apprehensive, and M.M. stood with her arms folded. 

This was awkward. 

But Tsuna could never forget that they were Mukuro's friends, and Chrome's first real friends as well.

"You... you guys can come over here, too," he tried, turning a little so that the baby's face pointed towards them as he continued to hold her in the crook of his arms (amazed, quietly, at the smoothness of lips, nose, eyelids and cheeks).

Silence.

Come to think of it, you didn't need Hyper Intuition to see that not a one among the four of them seemed happy with this turn of events. Tsuna had been attributing their apparent displeasure to their frankly grouchy (or, in Fran's case, miserable and monotone) temperaments, or perhaps to whatever vague event he thought he had caught fragments of conversations about. Now that he was thinking about the issue more clearly, though -- well, it did seem a little strange. Sure, maybe the Kokuyo types wouldn't know what to do with a baby (did any of them? did he?), but it was the parentage that should've inspired brighter faces . . . right? Because this was _Mukuro's_ child. And, even if Ken and Chikusa had once been awkward with Chrome, and even if M.M. had once been openly hostile, Tsuna liked to imagine they did care for her, and they certainly all loved Mukuro.

Then again.

Tsuna cast brief glances at Yamamoto and Gokudera, remembering the kinds of body language he had occasionally glimpsed in rare moments after his wedding -- moments when the two of them had probably thought he wasn't looking.

Oh. So that's what it was. 

Fear of replacement. Displacement. Maybe a hint of jealousy. 

Obvious, when you thought about it.

Gokudera and Yamamoto, with all their reckless enthusiasm, had concealed their feelings through overcompensatory friendly destruction at Ryohei's house (until such times as Hana kicked them out), through their work, and through the occasional likewise explosion-laden vacation in which Tsuna found himself dragged along for the ride, but Chikusa was sedate and Ken's irritation tended to be too formless to take creative expression (even the kind of "creativity" Gokudera was wont to express), so they just sulked. Sucked it up. And it was with a slight pang of guilt that Tsuna remembered they _had_ lost Mukuro before, so . . . maybe their worry had some basis in memory, and could not be blamed.

"Maybe later," he said, more quietly this time. He pulled the baby against him.

To his surprise, it was M.M. who stepped forward, tossing her hair and unfolding her arms, pushing behind her ear a few red strands that had fallen free from her clips.

"Here," she said. "Let me have a look at her."

Tsuna eyed her apprehensively.

"Don't be paranoid." She put her hands on her hips. "If I were _gonna_ sell a baby on the black market, I wouldn't do it around a bunch of goody-goody mafia goons like you guys. Sheesh."

"That's not even what I was concerned about!" Tsuna said. (Although, now that you mentioned it -- ) "I just ... you ... "

What, exactly, was a non-awkward way of explaining that he seemed to remember that M.M. was in love with Mukuro, or had been at some time in the past, and what with being a romantic rival to Chrome, this whole circumstance felt... _weird_? Sure, Tsuna didn't think he would be awkward with Haru if he and Kyoko ever did have a child, but Haru hadn't been known to scream and rage at Kyoko or call her names, either.

"I never knew you liked babies," Tsuna explained (feeling lame as soon as the words left his mouth).

"Who says I do? Look, will you make up your mind already?"

"All right," he answered. He was still feeling a little reluctant, but something told him Chrome actually would've approved this decision. It was the kind of person she was, and so, keeping that in mind, Tsuna passed the infant to her -- her -- whatever relation M.M. could be said to have to her. _Friend of her parents._

M.M. looked down at the baby. Her expression was difficult to read with the way she lowered her head, but with the play of light and shadows, to Tsuna's eyes, she looked less sneering and more thoughtful than he had expected. Contemplative, somehow. It was a look that Mukuro himself wore sometimes, even more so these days, with new changes in life. Just as he tended to do, she broke the solemness with a sharp laugh.

"Mukuro-chan made such a mistake," she said, still gazing down at the child's closed eyes. Her voice was so strange, so full of laughter and yet simultaneously sad. "Unbelievable." She was shaking her head, but smiling wanly. "You'd think he would've learned."

"Learned what?"

"He's always been the kind of guy who does whatever he wants," she continued, apparently not hearing Tsuna. "You're going to put him in over his head, and you don't even know it yet. And the funny thing is, he hasn't admitted it to himself either. Typical Mukuro-chan."

M.M. adjusted the baby in her arms. As she continued looking down, her smile widened.

"Well, what's done is done. Don't disappoint me, okay? Grow up to be a giant bitch."

"Thanks... I guess..." Tsuna said when she handed the baby back to him with that same smile -- that same paradoxical gentleness of body language mixed with the mirthful and mocking gleam of the eyes and quirk of the lips -- how was it possible that she and Mukuro could make their physicality reflect such different and opposite emotions at the same time? What inspired the mocking (let alone the gentleness)?

You had to wonder sometimes.

~*~

"You did wonderful, Chrome," Tsuna was saying when it was only the two of them alone in Chrome's room. Even Kyoko remained behind to converse with the others, citing that her intuition told her that Tsuna was (in this instance) the one who needed to return to Chrome first. She had chosen him as her Boss. She had asked him whether he would have her, once. Chrome, the quietest of them all, was always choosing people. Mukuro, Tsuna, her daughter. For all that it seemed they chose her, you had only to look at the present circumstances to see how she exerted her own little pull on the world around her.

When it was just the two of them here like this, the quietness felt mutually conspiratorial. Reminding Tsuna of two former teenagers who had been alone, once, and now look at them -- surrounded by people. Making lives with their partners. Planning for the future. Hoping to survive life for a while longer. Chrome was holding her daughter, eye half-lidded, dreamy.

Everyone agreed that the childbirth process had been kind of traumatizing to watch, but Chrome went through it as she went through all pain. Her face had expressed it, and she had grunted and shifted and grown rigid, but she hadn't screamed like you saw in the movies. She looked so peaceful now. Tsuna had thought maybe, just maybe, Mukuro's face would show something at the moment of the birth, but there had been nothing you could recognize as doting. Tsuna chewed his lip for a second, then looked down at Chrome. He hated to wonder about the kinds of things he _was_ wondering about; he felt invasive, even mentally. She seemed content, but.

"Chrome," he started. Slowly, tentatively. "Why... why did he -- Mukuro -- "

She looked up at him from the bed. Tsuna was sitting on the windowsill, watching the day outside. "Yes, Boss?"

He swallowed. Strangled his restraint. "Why wasn't he here?"

 _Isn't._ Why isn't he here. The real question: Was this pregnancy an ... accident?

He really, really couldn't ask her that. But he had wondered multiple times.

Chrome's gaze shifted to the baby.

"He's always here," she said simply. "We are never apart."

She reached down, indicating her abdomen.

"I make my organs, but. The stress today. It could have ..."

"I was worried. We were worried, but you did so well."

"With his help," Chrome continued, softly. A mysterious smile touched her lips, and she leaned her head back against the pillow. "We were talking all day, Boss."

Oh. And maybe Kyoko guessed, given how she knew Chrome, but the others couldn't have figured it out. And, really, even though Chrome hadn't said not to tell anyone, Tsuna somehow felt (tacitly) as though it was not his place to elaborate or make excuses to his friends. They would believe what they had always believed, and they would wonder what they had always wondered. Illusionists were illusionists for a reason, and right now, with one-half of his most mysterious Guardian, he felt strangely at ease. Warm. Like he'd been let in on something very private, very precious. Which was the truth, because Chrome had chosen to give him that. He wanted to savour it.

"Mukuro-sama is my partner," Chrome said, curling her fingers around the baby's tiny ones. "And she's our partner now, too."

Reborn would say, upon his return from Italy: Take two people whose molecules have been fused together for ten years and fuse them into another person.

You can't even imagine the psychic disturbance it's caused. To add a new component to a relationship like that.

Tsuna would ask: what does that mean?

Was it like the time Chrome began to tear herself apart? They weren't going to hurt themselves irrationally, were they? The spectre of memory: Chrome's organs. Mukuro beneath the dark waters. How could his Mist Guardians be so strong, so untouchable, never screaming or crying in human pain, and yet have such an aura of vulnerability -- fragility.

"I don't understand," Tsuna admitted.

"It means," Reborn began, "that you're going to be a godfather, stupid Tsuna."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (maayyybbeee that was kind of a pun...)
> 
> .tbc.
> 
> I have maybe one more part planned for this particular story, but I will happily do more works in this universe if folks would like me to keep going. I SOMETIMES WORRY I AM WEARING OUT THIS ONE PARTICULAR UNIVERSE in which I am writing (really, my last three fics were set in it!), but I love it so. XD;


	4. the dark forest in the middle of life

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did I say one more chapter? Okay, I meant two. One more... after this one. :|a Isuck.
> 
> I kind of neglected the other characters in this chapter, but I do hope the very end will make up for it.
> 
> \--And I also realized, woe is me, that a lot of details about this fic verse are still very ambiguous ("what is that thing X was referencing in that one chapter!!"). I would like to tease everything out, eventually, but it seems to be taking a while, over the course of multiple stories set in this timeline. I do actually know what all the strange throwaway references are in reference TO; I'm just terrible at putting them out there in a timely fashion. :|a
> 
> So.  
> There are all kinds of things Mukuro is not emotionally equipped for. And Chrome has this whole issue of NOT USING WORDS. Thus communicating what I am intending as an author sometimes gets very difficult, between the two.  
> One of these days, The Baby (TM) will be older, and not a baby, and thus use words. Hopefully better than either of those two.

There had been Chrome, standing before the rows of produce that lay beneath the long, slim, flourescent bulbs that embossed the apples and plastic wrap with sheen.

The colours you could see in a grocery store had always been one of Kyoko's favourite aspects of shopping: simple, but vivid, the pure reds and yellows and oranges of fruit, the prolific green of leafy vegetables creeping over the edges of their resting places -- as if extending tendrils towards potential buyers, the artificial pink of candy bags, colourful arrays of sushi and sashimi, and the luminescence of green teas faintly shimmering, bottle beside bottle, row after row, in perfect order.

The scene of a grocery always reminded her of pleasant ideas. Food, nurture, life, harmony. Kyoko smiled when she saw Chrome, but Chrome's attention was elsewhere. She was staring -- intently, as though bewildered -- at the vegetables, one hand cradling a head of cabbage. Which she returned to its place, then lifted again, then returned again. 

Kyoko, shopping basket in hand, made her way towards Chrome and tapped, gently, on her shoulder. When Chrome turned, she had _such_ a startled expression that Kyoko couldn't suppress the giggle. "Chrome-chan!" she began. "It's so nice to see you!"

"Kyoko-chan." And, after several seconds had elapsed: "Hi."

Chrome's voice, still so delicate-sounding, also had such a subdued quality most of the time; she did not move to embrace Kyoko, as Haru would have done in her place.

Haru would have yelled her friend's name and lunged forward in a flurry of mutual hugs and excited conversation, but Chrome was different. Chrome moved about the world slowly, inquisitively. Smiles formed on her lips, but they tended to take a while to get from one end to the other. She never moved to cheerfully embrace her friends of her own volition, and she would keep her hands held together. 

Strangers, no doubt, took her for shy or stand-offish, but Kyoko, who had lived with Chrome for a little while when they were girls, and who had walked with her to class day after day, year after year, had come to understand that Chrome's mind simply was not wired to suggest that she should rush into people's arms, burst into grins at their presence, or regale them with conversation. It did not occur to her and was not her natural mode of comfort.

Most would call Chrome "uncomfortable" in her body, but Kyoko believed she was _comfortable_ with her established measures of space, and any real discomfort stemmed mainly from her realization of her awkward presentation upon _other people_ \-- her awareness of their expectations, assumptions, and consequent actions.

And Chrome always looked happiest around Mukuro. Possibly because he was the one person who could not misinterpret any aspect of her being.

Still grinning, Kyoko looked down at the cabbage. "You're buying healthy, Chrome-chan."

The urge to loop her arm around Chrome's, introduce her to some much-treasured recipes, and take her for a spree around the store was _almost_ overwhelming. But Kyoko held back, knowing how awkwardly that would've gone over with Chrome, no matter how well-meaning her intention was.

"I thought I should," Chrome said. She gave another halting glance, then quickly reached out, grabbed the cabbage, and placed it within her basket.

"We have to visit each other more often. I want to see your little girl. I want to see Mukuro-kun, too. You must be so busy now -- Tsu-kun and I have always put off having children, but I want to see your baby. She's so cute."

She paused. You had to do that sometimes. You had to feel Chrome out and make certain you hadn't said anything which had been invasive enough to make her feel awkward. If you did that, she would begin to fidget, but right now, she was just standing there, faintly smiling, gaze focused.

"Yes," Chrome said at last. Still so reserved in her revelations. "We're busy. I'm happy... but..."

"Happy but busy? You're glowing, Chrome-chan."

"Happy... but... "

She looked down at her basket. So far, Chrome had put into it Darjeeling tea. Kyoko had come to their house on a few occasions, though Mukuro tended to stubbornly vanish when she was around, so she was rarely able to chat with him as she would like. Chrome, on the other hand, was a willing partner for drinking tea, even if she would discuss her life and goings-on only incrementally.

"I guess..." Chrome looked around conspiratorially. "I guess I can tell you."

Kyoko nodded. Of course. Of course Chrome could confide in her, she would insist.

~*~

And she informed Kyoko, more briefly and succinctly, about some of the following details:

Chrome was doing sit-ups one day because, even though her friends kept telling her she looked great and _healthy_ with the extra post-baby weight, her career was one which demanded that she be fit and trim enough to sneak around, sometimes into small spaces, and quickly at that. 

Mukuro, in the meanwhile, had pulled up an elaborate illusion of the interior of some facility in Germany, and he was toying with the imagery and mapping its structures and narrating his future exploits with the glee that some men invested in sports. "Here, dear Chrome," Mukuro was saying, all thin smiles, "is where we shall place it. That culmination of Dr. Verde's ideas with mine."

Mukuro had been in such a state of excitement over his plans, of which only Chrome and Hibari Kyouya knew. Boss would find out someday, as would the others in Vongola, but for now, Chrome had sworn herself to secrecy. (She did not tell Kyoko about the specifics in this recounting, either.) At the moment, as excited as Chrome was for Mukuro's vision, her mind was drifting elsewhere, and she asked, abruptly, "Are you having -- an affair, Mukuro-sama?"

"Of course I am," Mukuro answered without missing a beat. "And since you had that --" He pointed at the crib. "Everyone is aware of it. If only I had been able to pass on to you my capacity for secrecy."

Chrome blinked. Had he really -- was he really misunderstanding, or was this sarcasm? Sometimes, it was impossible to tell, even for her. Regardless:

"I meant... with someone else, Mukuro-sama."

 _That_ actually caused Mukuro to stop turning about, surveying and gesturing at his illusory work, though when he faced Chrome, he was still stiffly tapping the little umbrella in his fruity liquor-infused concoction.

"Why would you ask me something like that?"

For once, Mukuro almost stammered the words, swallowing down his surprise, and if she had been another person (like, perhaps, Hibari, who could never ever catch Mukuro off guard in a million years, or Fran, who often did but who appeared utterly nonchalant about it), Chrome might have felt a sense of inner triumph, but as it was, Mukuro's being flustered caused her to turn flustered in short order, and within seconds, she was pink-cheeked and flailing, wanting nothing more than to bury her face into her arms. "I just thought... I... "

"Well?"

"It's... been less frequent lately... that we do 'that,' I guess."

Chrome, Mukuro had decided, was assuredly as troublesome as Fran sometimes, although she was cuter, so the difference was at least compensated for.

With her hair pulled up, and in her exercise T-shirt and shorts, she looked younger than the woman she was, almost as young as the girl she had been before, and Mukuro was rubbing his temple while ruminating about how little desire he had to engage in this particular conversation. It was (he would say even then) better suited to the kind of discussion Chrome would engage in with her female friends, was it not? Bedroom talk and so forth? ("I don't talk about that," Chrome argued.)

"I'd rather you not get pregnant again, naturally," Mukuro said finally, taking a nonchalant sip of his drink and looking away from Chrome.

He always had been a bad liar. "That's not all."

"Would it trouble you if I were?" He sounded curiously detached. "You are after all my partner, by which I mean in the business sense. Not my -- you know, whatever Tsunayoshi calls the little lady. Wife, I suppose."

"I don't know," Chrome confessed. Should she be bothered by the idea? Years ago, when their relationship had first begun in its sexual incarnation, she had simply assumed that she was not the first, or perhaps his exclusive person of interest. After all, why would she have been? Mukuro was equal parts fascinated and appalled by human beings. There were many other human beings who could offer him different _curiosities_. Chrome had just enjoyed spending time with him. Whatever that had meant, she was fine with it back then. 

But that was then.

"I'm not, in any case," he admitted. Chrome knew Mukuro was being honest because he sounded sheepish. Mukuro, unlike your average human being, only sounded sheepish when he was being honest: his lies were full-throated declarative confidence.

"Then -- why?"

"I'd really rather not discuss this, but suffice it to say I've not been... drawn to the idea of sexual activities... " She must have been making a face, because he added, clearing his throat: "Tsk, it's nothing to do with you. Rather that we're out of sync in our interests. Let's leave it at that, shall we?"

So that was that. This was not the first time during their decade-long relationship that Chrome had sensed that her libido was not always in exact alignment with Mukuro's, or that his tended at times to wane, but it _was_ the first time her partner had ever actually articulated this formerly-clandestine truth for what it was, and his obvious awkwardness (embarrassment?) spoke volumes.

~*~

Groceries rested in the refridgerator. Chrome could hear the crickets outside, somewhere beneath the starlight, when it came crashing through the dream. 

It was night, and she had been lying in the bed with her cheek pressed to the pillow, having emerged from a warm bath to soak the pain out of her body.

Chrome relaxed amid her own drowsiness. Before she had drifted into sleep, she had been idly feeling out her body -- the heaviness of her breasts (newer, different), swollen still, at moments painful, the rawness of skin, the clinging press of flimsy satin cloth, the missing eye. She had masturbated earlier, remembering the time Kyoko-chan's friend had attempted to convince her to buy a vibrator -- the unspeakable embarrassment. Orgasm, at least, put the mind in space.

Let her sleep. No stress. No worry for the future.

And then the baby was crying.

Dear God, the baby was crying. A shrill, piercing cry that crashed through the dreams, resounded in Chrome's ears, and then there was the agony of being awoken at a tender time, the unwillingness to move. Please stop crying, she willed. Please stop.

Neuilly had not cried like this lately, now that she was a little older, but she was wailing away, and Chrome ached. When she pushed herself up with her hands, she discovered that Mukuro was not present. Not in the bed.

At first, in the early days, when the baby cried, Chrome would often look over and see him awake, with that little smile, in the nocturnal time in which he thrived better than she, with his long hair down, and he would say, just above a whisper, "Doesn't it remind you, dear Chrome?"

It hurt, which was what he meant. It hurt to be awoken at odd hours, and it reminded her of all the little and the larger pains, coupled with the awareness of the pain and frustration of the child, which she could sense acutely. Sometimes, on the edges of their dreams, his and hers, you could almost see the glow of the laboratory or the hospital, diminished but never wholly vanishing. Maybe there was a piece of them which wanted to remember. It gave their lives beginnings, after all. Contextualized them beyond the here and the now.

Chrome disentangled herself from the sheets and climbed out of bed. 

A jolt of surprise ran through her at the sight: the bedroom was filled and filling with pale mist.

There was Mukuro, sitting at the window where Boss had sat the day the baby was born.

She turned to face him, sluggish and blinking off sleep. "What is this?"

"But don't you know?" he replied, shrugging slightly. "Come now. I'm certain the question has been turned around."

Chrome bit her lip.

"I'm afraid -- ," he continued, nonchalant-sounding, though there was something in his posture that suggested deeper currents of feeling. "--that it is your distress which is affecting us. Not the reverse, as you may suspect."

"It's her doing," she realized aloud.

"The visuals are, at any rate," Mukuro admitted. "But it's a reaction..."

 _To me_ , Chrome thought. Mist: a sight beyond the vision of others, a pre-emptive headache, a suggestive pain, an early grief, an additional knowing, a sense of something in the world having gone horribly wrong. Chrome felt her child's alarm, her partner's alarm, the first literally turned physical, rolling off her small body like waves, filling the room, and it was then that the grief found its epicenter in her, washed over her, drowning her senses, and she knew. She understood. No one had told her, not yet, but tomorrow, she would receive the call, wouldn't she?

"Died," Chrome said, softly.

"Who?" Mukuro was watching her intently now.

"I... someone died... I know them... " 

She walked to the crib. Looked down.

"Do you feel it, Nagi?"

Abruptly: "My mother." Breathing steadily, awash in starlight, she reached into the crib. "My mother is dead."

~*~

It rained the next day.

Chrome received the call at 9:00 in the morning (plus a few minutes). She was sitting up in bed, watching green clock lights flashing in the dark. She shouldered her phone up against her neck, cocking her head and letting the voice on the other end drone on about how he was in charge of the funeral, and he knew it was _a little awkward_ ("I know your relationship was strained"), but would she be willing to attend? She was writing down his name. The date. The locations she was given. There would be a reading of the will.

Maybe, he said. Maybe "Nagi" was remembered. You never knew what was in someone's heart.

Silence. Silence. 

Are you there?

"Yes," she said.

Chrome decided to travel to a hotel. Take the train. She packed her luggage gingerly. There was no hurry.

Mukuro stood in the doorway, watching Chrome pack and pulling at the ends of his gloves. The child was also watching her. Chrome turned to look at them. No doubt there were levels on which she understood her child better than her partner did, but there were other levels on which she was certain she was excluded.

Looking at them now, those people she called family, she was absolutely certain that they were two silent co-conspirators. The baby, for all her present tense silence, would grow up to be as philosophical and baffled by human emotions as Mukuro was. You could see it in her eyes, somehow. They were alike from the instant she was born.

"I have been terrible lately, haven't I?" Mukuro mused aloud. He was smiling, but did not look pleased.

"I don't know if you mean that," Chrome said, "but you've been busy. Your project..."

"There's always a project on the horizon, though this one looks promising. Yes, I meant it. I have been terrible, but I always believe in being terrible with exceptional grace and style."

Chrome looked down.

"It's you I am concerned about, Chrome Dokuro. Tell me, when was the last time you used your powers significantly? Before she was born? Looking at you, living as though you were any other human being and you had to abide by the rules of reality, rather than making reality abide by your rules. It's very contradictory, isn't it? Your heart. That you tell me one day how happy you are, then seek to escape from us with every breath you take."

"You do, too."

"I do. I wish someone in Cosa Nostra would trouble the Vongola again. We could travel to Italy. I, naturally, would possess the assailants and make them stick pencils through their eyeballs. You know, something _fun_ like that." He crossed his arms. He was wearing those improbably tall boots and that jacket, and there were strange tassels appearing from seemingly nowhere on his jeans. "We must both realize that babies are incredibly dull. And this one doesn't even talk."

"You can't resent her forever." Chrome could feel herself losing it, gradually. What terrible timing this conversation was turning out to be.

"Only until she's old enough to understand me, and then she'll be more interesting, anyway."

"You're right," she said, flatly. "You are being terrible."

"I was teasing." More softly, "I don't resent her. Not actually."

Chrome looked back at him wistfully. He went on:

"It would be rather pointless, wouldn't it? To resent my own child. We know what that amounts to, don't we?"

The tears should have come, perhaps, but they did not. Chrome walked across the room, crossed the distance between them, wrapped her arms around his body, and placed her head against his chest. Heartbeat, heartbeat. She closed her eye. As she breathed, taking in the warmth of his skin, she felt his fingers in her hair, his hands cradling the back of her head.

~*~

They were both too raw.

Chrome wished she were better with words.

She wished she could explain to him that she _was_ genuinely happy, but also frightened about the future in equal measures. There was no paradox inherent in this. Human beings are complicated. She wanted to embrace her new life without becoming irrelevant in her old one. Mukuro understood that about her. He must have understood. He always had been the one to recognize the different lives she was always trying to balance. The reverse was also true. 

The trouble with them had always been that their crises happened simultaneously and enhanced each other's frustration. Chrome knew now why their sex life was at an ebb, why Mukuro always looked like he was trying to escape when he watched through the window or paced about the house -- him, the expert on confined spaces.

And she wished she could assuage his concerns. He had never dealt gracefully with anxiety. He would never admit he experienced it. Not to her. Not to anyone. She would take him aside, if she could, and explain to him (if she had the words) that life was not all bad, that he did not have to be afraid of feelings. But that would not be Mukuro, to simply accept such a line of reasoning, and that would not be her, to make impassioned speeches.

He would have to come around on his own time. Maybe his friends could help. Maybe Boss could help. Maybe Kyoko could help, if they were to speak to one another. But Chrome could not. Not right this moment. Not now.

She hoped Mukuro would forgive her. The selfishness of solitary grief was a luxury she had seldom indulged in since they met ten years before. 

He went with her as far as the train station. There, he removed her luggage from the trunk and passed it into her hands. Chrome was standing, dry-eyed, before the doors to the trains.

They eyed each other in silence. Neuilly sat in her stroller. Chrome looked at her -- the baby's eyes were open, for all that she was quiet. The watchfulness of that child, the way she fixated her attention, was already a discernible personality trait.

"I wanted her to be like you," Chrome said. 

She hesitated, then continued: "Outspoken. Proud."

More than anything, Chrome had wished, had prayed, for a loud child. Healthy and alive. Not bent, broken into silences.

She would never be able to stand for anyone telling her daughter not to speak her honest mind. Not any adult. Let her be vocal. Let her scream her emotions and cry with grief and gnash her teeth and yell with joy and learn all the words of feeling and human thought.

Who would dare to say that her speech was of less worth than anyone else's? Chrome would not allow it. Not ever.

Mukuro leaned forward -- hands on Chrome's shoulders, mouth against her ear, murmuring, "Be careful that you don't allow your ghosts to reclaim you, Chrome."

She watched the rain. Watched the other two living beings, knowing one could not speak and the other was constrained by a vocabulary of limited emotions. 

"I'll be back soon," she promised.

"One certainly hopes so," Mukuro said. "It wouldn't do to have Sawada Tsunayoshi claiming he can't find his Mist Guardian."

Please, she thought: take good care of one another.


	5. regrets

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ... did i say one more chapter? I MEANT TWO MORE...
> 
> okay, gosh, i feel some deja vu here!! LOOK I REALLY AM NEARING THE END, OKAY, LMAO... the scenes just keep lasting longer than i expected. 9__9

There was Mukuro, after the rains had passed, wearing that ridiculous black coat even indoors, one shoulder pressed against the wood of the kitchen doorway, the afternoon shadow of his body blending with the black tips of his boots.

From head to toe, shadow melting to shadow, a slanting sideways L. Standing alone, as he always seemed to be when Tsuna saw him from any distance, Mukuro was holding a piece of paper up to the light. It was thin, torn and ragged-edged between his black-clad fingers, but the scrawl -- recognizably messy, visible even from afar -- looked like that of a younger person. Fran, or perhaps Ken. Fran, Tsuna decided, catching a glimpse of the badly drawn figures which decorated the letter.

Mukuro cut an impressive image of solitude, though it must have been deceptive. Like water, chains, dark places. Hadn't he looked so lonely, back then? If Tsuna didn't know better, he could've viewed the scene before him as a replication, an extension of loneliness, but the sheet of paper between Mukuro's fingertips was proof of life. Then, when Tsuna edged forward, the chime on the air -- responsive, from the direction of the cradle.

"How long are you going to stand there, Sawada Tsunayoshi?" The shoulder pressed to the wall shrugged, slumped, and Mukuro tossed the letter onto the kitchen table. 

When Mukuro turned his head, after many more seconds had elapsed, Tsuna took note of the upturned jaw, the narrowed eyes, the haughty, contemptuous, almost bored expression. Mukuro was not smirking. He looked uncharacteristically tired. "You are absolutely terrible at spying." 

There was no venom in the words.

Tsuna stepped further indoors, sliding the glass door closed behind him. Hands in his pockets, he surveyed the household slowly: dog, padding about the floor, cradle, furniture sleeping in the late day's dying rays of sunlight. And Mukuro, presiding wraith-like, detached.

"Where is Chrome?"

Mukuro turned on his heel, fully facing Tsuna. He was silent. Appraising.

"All right," Tsuna said. "I should've known better to expect an answer from you."

"You should have," Mukuro agreed quietly. "Is there some reason you have been invading my household without my permission?"

Tsuna, if he were so inclined, could have pointed out that Mukuro had some nerve to say that, considering that Mukuro's move-in began with Mukuro stealing from _Tsuna's_ household. But there was no sense in making such an observation. Mukuro was ever-unfazed by hypocrisy. The rules did not apply to him; had never applied to him.

"Yes," Tsuna said. He looked Mukuro in the eye. "I came to apologize to you, Rokudo Mukuro."

He did not hesitate and he did not falter.

Tsuna had thought about this beforehand. He'd contemplated his decision. He was still awkward around Mukuro most of the time, but Family was Family. You didn't ask for them. You got what you got, in Tsuna's case more so than most. And when it came right down to it, when Tsuna made the decision to be as serious as he was in Dying Will mode, and as determined, then there was no room for faltering. 

Mukuro, for his part, seemed to respond to the tone, the words, and the level eye contact. It was the way that tell-tale lazy smile began to creep back into his expression, as if he had procured a victory in an undeclared battle, but it was something else, too. Not quite fondness. Fascination, maybe.

It was good enough, Tsuna decided. Mukuro dealt in _not quite_ positives. You took what you could get in this, too.

"I shouldn't have jumped to the conclusion that you were doing something that was endangering your family," Tsuna continued. "I -- we -- were worried because... well, I can't speak for Gokudera, but I know what it's like to have a father who was... it caused me and Mom a lot of problems."

The hard thing about communicating with Mukuro was being open and sincere. He wasn't like Gokudera, or Yamamoto, or Kyoko for that matter. You expected he would laugh in your face and mock whatever vulnerability you exposed. Tsuna had never been dishonest with him. But he hadn't ever felt especially inclined to be extremely forthcoming, either. A small part of him noted that it worked for Chrome, but Chrome was different. Their relationship was different. She was necessarily absolved from Mukuro's list of People to Mentally and Emotionally Undo, whereas Tsuna literally held slot #1. At least, he had in the past.

Regardless, Tsuna was determined to give an explanation for his actions. For his own sake. For honesty's sake. It would only be fair. Mukuro could do with it what he wanted.

"I guess you could say it's a personal issue. I don't want to see a child go through what I went through until I met Reborn. But my point is -- Mukuro -- I don't think you're that kind of person. Chrome chose to make a life with you, and I trust Chrome's judgment."

Because when you got right down to it, Chrome wasn't like his mother, or Gokudera's mother, or Yamamoto's absent mother, or her own mother. Chrome, for all her quietness, was full and alive and present and highly aware. It wasn't fair to Chrome to assume that she was complicit in a victimhood of domestic neglect.

"So, I'm sorry things got out of hand yesterday. And also..." Tsuna gazed back and forth between Mukuro and the cradle, eyes tacitly seeking permission even before the request was put into words. "... I wanted to ask if I could see her."

Mukuro closed his eyes and laughed to himself, in that brief shuddering way. The trident materialized, slipping confidently and comfortably into the loose grip of his hand, but Mukuro did not move, holding both arms at his sides and looking like a sentry in his doorway. What was that all about? 

Mukuro opened his eyes.

"Take her into your arms, then, and come with me."

When Tsuna gathered the baby close, he smiled at her, and she smiled back, wide and giggling. Tsuna was trying not to give into his baser, squishier instincts around children, but he had not seen a child's smile that was comparable to this since the days when I-pin was a little girl, all gentle and rosy-cheeked. Save for the occasional five minutes of visitation here or there by child Lambo or child I-pin, the Vongola compound had long lacked the laughter and play of children.

The future lay before them: a new generation.

"Don't be too proud of that." Mukuro had already turned again, but he was looking back over his shoulder. "Her reaction to you, that is. She tries to eat the garden snails when I take her outside. She isn't exactly what you would term an arbiter of taste."

Ah. Classic Mukuro. After the strange quietness, the insults were _almost_ refreshing. Tsuna followed Mukuro's lead, watching Mukuro's back from behind. Neuilly was so warm against him. She smelled -- powdery.

"Do you really do things like change her diaper?" Tsuna raised an eyebrow. "It's pretty hard to imagine... from you."

"There are more things in heaven and earth than dreamt of in your philosophy, as they say."

Tsuna was fairly certain Shakespeare had not intended that quote to be representative of diaper-changing habits, but he would take that as a yes. "Where are you taking me?"

"Do you trust me?" Mukuro asked, like habit.

"Absolutely." Again: no hesitation. "I thought I made that clear."

"So you did. More's the pity."

 _Oh, come off it._ "I appreciate the household tour, Mukuro."

"Is that sarcasm from the Vongola Tenth? I'm almost impressed."

"I guess I learned from the best."

"Where I'm taking you," Mukuro began, picking up the earlier question as though they had never departed from it, "is to find the answers of which you're so curious."

"I've never known you to tell me any answers about anything, Mukuro."

" _Tell?_ Certainly not. I can, however, _show._ "

~*~

Gokudera had shoved his fists in his pockets, rings digging into flesh through the barrier of fabric, and he was saying to Yamamoto as they walked, "You and _my sister_ \-- I can't --" to which Yamamoto was laughing affably and cheerfully answering, "Hey, it was a long time ago. And it was only twice! Or -- wait, three times!"

Gokudera glared as Yamamoto explained that Bianchi had become bored pretty quickly with their trysts, and Yamamoto hadn't exactly opposed her decision to move on to other lovers, considering she probably would have tried to kill him had their affair continued.

Both men stopped in their tracks when they noticed the figure who stood before the post office, traffic lights flashing above her head and road signs pointing in all the directions she was not looking.

Chrome seemed out of place. She often seemed out of place, but this was even worse. Wearing dark blue stockings, brown shoes, and a heavy brown coat in which she seemed to drown or perhaps _float_ , Chrome held two equally drab suitcases. She was wearing sunglasses. Her hair was frizzing slightly, and although she was staring ahead, she did not appear to be seeing anything.

Now, Chrome could look a little -- unmoored sometimes, but she was normally well-dressed and she tended to cut a pretty-but-distant-woman image. Waifish (less so as a grown woman), maybe, but she had never looked like an outright _bum_ before. This, though -- this made Gokudera think of people he had met on the streets and back alleys of Italy.

"Chrome!" Yamamoto called, waving, before Gokudera could stop him. He was already moving forward, with Gokudera following behind, thinking maybe he would grab the idiot's sleeve or something.

"Slow down!" he whispered, exasperated. "You -- "

It was the Family Gokudera was thinking of, and the altercation from yesterday, and if you unsettled Chrome, she'd probably bolt like a rabbit, and then they wouldn't get any answers at all. 

But Chrome was turning, as if in slow motion: lifting her sunglasses.

Yamamoto let his amiable laugh slot itself into an eyebrow-raised expression of friendly concern and inquisition. Gokudera heaved a sigh. Chrome nodded slightly. She didn't say anything, which was also weird. You expected at least a _Gokudera-san_ and _Yamamoto-san_.

"Hey, Chrome," Yamamoto started, "You're not lost or anything, are you?"

She looked at him.

He shrugged one shoulder and turned to Gokudera, addressing him. "Hey, it's a pretty crazy area, right? I used to get lost on these streets all the time."

"That's because you don't pay attention to anything but _baseball,_ " Gokudera agreed, although he was pretty sure Yamamoto was lying -- making up a bunch of bullshit. "In any case, we're here to clean up this area for the Tenth."

"Yeah, that's right! Reborn's orders. I think Tsuna doesn't know about it yet. But see that rubble back there?"

"Don't ask." Gokudera cut him off before he thought to continue with that story. "Anyway, the area is all secured, now. The mission was successful, and our enemies will know better than to fuck with the Vongola!"

"You can come back with us to our hotel room if you're hungry," Yamamoto offered, undeterred by Chrome's blank, staring silence. "We have yakitori takeout."

"If you can stand all his sports _shit_ crowding up the room," Gokudera added, shoulders stiffening.

And that was how Chrome found her way to the hotel bedroom Yamamoto and Gokudera had rented for the past night and for two nights in the future, counting this evening.

She certainly had not intended to encounter them in this part of Japan -- it seemed like a coincidence of the highest order, so perfect that Chrome half-wondered whether somone had orchestrated the encounter (Reborn, perhaps? or a similarly talented puppeteer?) -- but maybe the meeting really had been one of those improbable dice rolls of chance.

Hotels brought back memories for her, and this particular room was messy -- messy in a style that Chrome's life post-Kokuyo had grown surprisingly unaccustomed to. Mess translated into life, and the signs of life were spread in full view here. Pizza boxes (Gokudera's), scattered pages of loose writing torn from notebooks and half-falling off the table (also Gokudera's), glasses in which only a thin brown bottom swill indicated the former presence of rum, beer bottles and little shot glasses -- an altogether impressive suggestion of alcohol consumption. A closet of fine suits, and a trunk spilling with more boyish clothes, jeans and T-shirts. Yamamoto's sandals by the doorway, his tie across the bed, his aforementioned yakitori takeout boxes companionably settled next to Gokudera's papers. 

Yamamoto sat on the bed, sword sheathed and visible over his shoulder. He had an expansive, relaxed way about him, whereas Gokudera was up and setting out more glasses, mixing more drinks, scooping handfuls of crackers into his mouth from a box.

"It's a mess," Yamamoto said, smiling at Chrome. "Sorry about that."

When she continued to sit silently, Gokudera experimented by passing her a beer. Chrome accepted, took a sip, and gagged slightly.

Gokudera was watching her intently -- with that natural mathematician's impulse to understand a particularly complicated equation. What he wondered -- what you always had to wonder at times like this -- was whether Chrome and Mukuro had been involved in some kind of argument.

Tsuna was always saying that you couldn't assume that those two had the kind of personal friction that Gokudera associated with lower-case f _family_ \-- the Tenth and he had just had a talk about this, right before he and Yamamoto left for their work -- and Gokudera deferred to Tsuna's judgment (if grudgingly, where _Mukuro_ was concerned), but then, what the hell was Chrome doing out here, looking like the walking dead? Like someone had punched her in the face and she was swaying around all day in a daze of pain?

Chrome made about as much sense as quantum particles.

She pointed at the counter with the shot glasses on it. "Can I?"

It was the first time she had spoken to either of them in this meeting -- something besides glazed looks and vague nods.

"Sure, go ahead," Yamamoto said. He and Gokudera exchanged glances.

The rumour went -- in as much there really existed any rumours about Chrome -- that Chrome was given to drinking in private, sometimes. Wine, at least. And maybe it was an acquired taste from Mukuro, as he had glibly and offhandedly joked that their daughter was conceived with "copious Italian wine consumption" (of course, knowing him, that could've just as easily been a sarcastic aside). Unless that consumption was one-sided, the remark suggested Chrome had been complicit. When the mafiosi gathered at evening parties, she would sip champagne coolly, slowly, as if someone had taught her how for appearance's sake.

But Chrome never went out for drinks purely for the bar scene -- post-sports victory booze, as Ryohei and Yamamoto were fond of, or post-mission alcohol, as Gokudera could kick back. Hibari was sedate, distant and sober, Lambo went to the kind of house parties you expected from a teenager, and Mukuro was also aloof, formal, wielding wine like an affectation of Italian humanity -- which, perhaps, was near enough to the truth. 

Chrome standing at the counter downing vodka shots was a new one.

Two shots of blue label Absolut Vodka and thirty minutes, and Chrome was looking much more relaxed. She had shrugged off her massive coat and plain shoes, revealing that she was actually wearing a frilly black dress, her body still as short as anyone remembered (both men had to look down to make eye contact with her), but more voluptuous since the baby had been born.

Gokudera was reading a book ( _Guinness World Records,_ it turned out to be, but Chrome didn't know that yet) while Yamamoto listened to a sports podcast and arranged the photo gallery on his laptop.

Chrome, hands on her hips and a little fuzzyheaded, caught a glimpse of his desktop (Jirou, in impressive high-definition photography, tongue lolling) and another picture, as it opened and then was closed.

"That -- " She pointed, then remembered herself through the inebriation, and blushed hotly, lowering her arm by her side. "Sorry."

"Hm?" Yamamoto clicked the image again, re-opening it.

His Facebook and folders, which he cheerfully showed Chrome without hesitation (she was part of the team, right?) were filled with snapshots of middle school and high school, memories and dreams. Baseball games, sunny-backed sports groups with their arms around one another's shoulders. Hibari, glaring daggers at whoever was taking the picture (presumably Yamamoto himself). Then, Hibari, tonfa barred. Then, a more blurred photograph. The sequence of the action was easy enough to make sense of, motion blur notwithstanding.

"He doesn't really like having his picture taken," Yamamoto explained.

Even Chrome knew something about the Thing between Hibari and Yamamoto (mostly from Hibari-san's end -- she had seen him scowling at Yamamoto's texts punctuated by ":D :D :D!!" on more than one occasion). 

Looking through the menagerie of high school, Chrome recalled other relationships, or listened as the others explained them to her.

Haru and Hibari had gone on exactly one ill-fated date before she had told him she didn't think things would work out (Yamamoto: "Wonder what happened..." but Chrome had some approximation, having heard Haru's side of the story -- coldly threatening other movie-goers who disrupted theatre silence hadn't fostered the most romantic mood...).

Yamamoto, Tsuna, and Gokudera sitting on a bench together. Tsuna's chin uplifted and dimples as he smiled, and it was almost strange to look backwards in time and see Boss as the boy he was then, so small (and for Chrome, realizing they had grown incrementally, in proportion to one another).

Yamamoto polishing a bicycle. Kyoko and Tsuna at the school dance, Kyoko's hair decorated with tiny flowers, and her wrist marked by a fluffy bracelet, in that style which seemed so logical when you were fourteen, and the impossible redness of Tsuna's face as her arms wrapped around his neck in a later picture (the unassuming, careless smile she accompanied her gesture with), as he sat at the table and she stood behind him, picture perfect eye contact with the camera's gaze.

Presently, Gokudera was on page 220 of his reading material _("Reborn, aged 1 year to ~30s, assassin recorded to have killed the greatest number of targets with a single bullet in one shot: 230... via ricocheting... ")_ , but upon noticing the way Chrome and Yamamoto were intensely peering at the computer screen, he felt compelled to put the book aside and go investigate.

Particularly because he heard his name being mentioned and could only assume the other two were up to no good.

From the bickering that ensued ("Augh, what the hell? You haven't deleted that shit?" "Haha, I thought you guys were cute!" and so forth), certain things began to dawn on Chrome.

Epiphanies, you might call them. 

For one, she wasn't in any of the pictures, except occasionally as a figure glimpsed from behind or hovering, shadow-like, in the background. Technically, this was not a revelation: Chrome was aware -- and had been aware for as long as she could remember -- that she tended to remain aloof from most social gatherings, and even when she was physically present, she was never front and center.

But there was something about _seeing this_ from the vantage point of a decade later and through entire albums of content that really put the fullness of her friends' separate lives into perspective.

It wasn't that she retroactively felt excluded, as her distance was of her own making. It was more that she was starting to realize how much she had never known, or never even considered. Even the facts she had known, or the events she had known _of_ (in a textbook sense) felt so much broader, so much more alive when revisited through photographic narratives and fragments of conversation.

Gokudera and Yamamoto, as Chrome was beginning to understand through a warm, buzzed curtain of awareness, had been complicit in a significant -- and, to her, surprising number of casual quasi-romantic-and/or-sexual-relationships-slash-flings.

Moreover, so had _everyone else._

Once they had all three exchanged a few drinks, and Chrome was sitting on the bed, cross-legged, with her hand against her cheek, she began to hear reminiscing of such various courtships:

Yamamoto, notoriously, had recently outed himself (or rather had been outed by Fuuta and Bianchi) as having lost his virginity to Gokudera's sister. It could have been worse.

Worse was the fact that he and Byakuran had fucked at some point after the otherworldly healing Byakuran had provided, and _no_ , Gokudera would never let him live that one down, even though all Yamamoto could do was smile and shrug and say it had seemed like a good idea at the time. Squalo? Yeah, they'd had a few fun rounds, usually in between training sessions.

And remember how Gokudera's first awkward relationship with a girl had been with Shitopi-chan?

Hey, Yamamoto vouched that their school dance pictures were just as nice as Tsuna's, even though Shitopi-chan's idea of dancing was standing on her hands with her legs around Gokudera's neck. In every single one of their pictures, Gokudera looked like his eye was twitching and his teeth were clenching and he was tensing and squirming away, but that was just Gokudera.

Meanwhile, Yamamoto and Haru had dated during the same year, and there was a picture of the four of them standing at the top of a hill together. Trees, greenery as far as the eye could see, and water in the background.

Haru, like Yamamoto, was forever smiling, forever active and happy and glorious. Chrome had been vaguely aware, as all in Namimori were, that though she came from a different school, Haru and Yamamoto were termed _Namimori's_ most athletic couple, the superlatively sporty, quirky, and attractive couple, the kind of duo you imagined sipping from twin straws in a single milkshake, cheering at the same basketball games in the same stadium, running track together and assisting with one another's exercise routines. Popular at prom. With friends on every corner, beyond the dial of every cellphone number. You expected to see them years later, on Facebook, with two or three identically pretty, identically cheerful offspring. But then?

"I got a sports scholarship," Yamamoto explained.

And, it went without saying, college happened. For Yamamoto, mafia happened. 

Haru studied and traveled abroad. She was hopping from place to place, from article to article, and as the issues of the world grew in importance to her, Chrome gathered, she had wanted a boyfriend who was -- you might say, more strictly scientific-cerebral, with more of a passionate temperament.

Activist college life. That was Haru, never doing things in half-measures. She and Yamamoto broke up goodnaturedly. She shed a few tears for what-might-have-beens. He polished his swords with his implacable serenity.

At about this time, Chrome gathered, the number of semi-casual sexual encounters skyrocketed.

Gokudera and Haru began fucking around in a necessarily doomed courtship. At some point, Gokudera and Yamamoto also began to fuck around.

By day, Yamamoto and Gokudera would be roaming the espresso shops of Italy, tracking leads. By day, Haru was marching the streets in protest, with the wind behind her. 

By night, clubs and gun shots and cargo, Gokudera scowling at chemistry homework in the window of opportunity during which the above-ground working world would peer into their hectic lives. By night, cigarette stubs and explosions, thwarted heists and poker games and fucking Haru in the hotel bed before dawn came and she was running out the door with one shoe on and one shoe dangling from her hand, yelling about injustice.

It was a delirious way to live. 

Then, one day, the predicted, destined-to-be Big One hit. Gokudera and Haru argued. Haru left. Next thing anyone knew, she was fucking Bianchi, and Gokudera was yelling at Yamamoto with a scowl of disgust and disbelief that this meant not one but _two_ of the _idiots_ he had fucked had _fucked his sister_ , and also (taking a drag of his cigarette), _good riddance to the crazy bitch._ Both of them.

Chrome sat back, contemplating. "I didn't know," was all she could say.

Haru had never spoken to her about this. People had known about the relationship with Yamamoto, but that she and Gokudera had also entertained a _messing-around_ phase?

And, through it all, down the years, Haru had continued to speak of Tsuna, as if he were the one-who-got-away. But on the day when she showed up at Gokudera's and Yamamoto's hotel room in frantic tears, the day Tsuna had informed them all of his engagement, she confessed that, really, it was Kyoko, too. She was crying for years of unresolved sexual tension with her best friend.

"Crazy woman," was all Gokudera could think to say, as she stood in the doorway of the hotel in her brand new suit, and he in his jeans and belts and socks, but he'd taken her inside by the shoulder and told her to shut the damned door before the cold was let in. He had been making coffee. He offered Haru a cup, huffing that he knew she didn't need it, that she was already too wired, but whatever, it was what they had: "Pull yourself together. This is the will of the Tenth!"

But when their eyes and Yamamoto's eyes met, the same brief flash of uncertainty appeared.

Tsuna marrying. Kyoko marrying. Their best friends: marrying. Creating a new era in life.

Truth was, they were all a little bit in love with Tsuna. But the sort of _in-love_ that is transcendent, spiritual, and just as easily platonic. The quiet in-love of best friends. A relationship which never breaks up, never ends, never changes shape. Tsuna was the foundation for everything. And his marriage had made everyone temporarily distressed. It wasn't that he had a romantic partner -- he and Kyoko had been together for _years_. 

It was that he could, maybe, leave them. Or move on. Or grow up. Grow past them.

But he hadn't. The distress passed. The pictures of Haru and Bianchi came to an end. Who knew who Haru was fucking around with now, if anyone. Bianchi, so far as anyone knew, was seeing Dino (who had an affinity for disasters, if his history with Hibari was likewise taken into account), but not before he and Yamamoto had fucked if for no other reason than the agreeable awareness of having been with most of the same people. Because there was that Squalo thing, years ago--

"Who... else?" Chrome asked, eventually.

Her head was spinning a little by then. Merrily intoxicated. Like nothing in her background was of consequence, and she could listen to idle gossip all night with no trace whatsoever of guilt or shame.

No one was too sober. Yamamoto was a predictably talkative drunk, whereas Gokudera was naturally brooding, but slightly more forthcoming than he was at other times, and it was amazing to listen to the ease with which they could recite every rehearsed in-joke, every private shared anguish of the past -- the startling behind hotel door room candor of their lives on roads together.

Then again, Chrome knew it was not too dissimilar from how she was with Mukuro, or maybe even how she and Ken and Chikusa were together.

"Haha, I guess over the years, the number grew. It just kind of happened, you know?"

" _Lawnhead,_ " Gokudera added, with a huff of disgust, tossing his bottle into the bin with the same kind of open hand motion he used for throwing bombs. The secret strength and athleticism of their movements was apparent even in this more casual setting. "And that baseball freak. I don't even want to think about it."

"Oh, yeah, that's right -- "

"But Hana-san -- "

"She didn't care," Gokudera said. "She was... _bohemian_ or whatever you call it. Like my sister."

"Open-minded," Yamamoto offered. "Yeah. Just good locker room exercise, you know?"

There were others. Heiresses, disinherited former heiresses, the grandchildren of dethroned European princesses, Sicilian mafiosi, Ukrainian models. Gokudera maintained that he didn't care about any of that shit, anyway. He'd had, he guessed, about fifteen sexual partners. Not many. Not like that slimeball Shamal. 

Yamamoto? "Batting about fifty..."

And they'd both been tested for STDs. That went without saying. All clear. Totally clean.

Chrome took a deep breath.

She said, "I've..." And hesitated, feeling unsure of whether this was an admission she could make. Scratching her arms, hugging herself, she finished, "I've only ever been with... with one person."

It was a confession offered with no shortage of chagrin.

Even that one person hadn't exactly been _sexually forthcoming_ of late. The thought made Chrome's cheeks flush hot with embarrassment, but she couldn't actually betray Mukuro by uttering those words.

Normally, Chrome didn't feel awkward about her intensely focused monogamy, but it was something about the room, and the way the two men talked, and the pictures, and the alcohol, and the sports podcast still blaring in the background, and the memories, so many memories, of sunshine and pollen and adolescence and baseball uniforms and girls' skirts, warm springs and sticky summers and sakura, and all the magic that goes into those years of your life.

Then there was adulthood. A beautiful adulthood like Bianchi's, or even like Haru's. Or like Yamamoto's and Gokudera's, full of cheers and mess and casual sex. Mostly, it was the _energy_ , the feeling -- as much as she regretted it, as much as she was loathe to admit that she experienced it -- of streams of life having passed Chrome by. 

Or her, having passed them by.

"I was having a baby this year," she added with a sigh, like an apology. That's it. That's what she'd been doing, in place of keeping up her work in Italy. 

"But that one person was _Mukuro,_ " Yamamoto replied, still sounding casual at first. Then, with a more serious note in his voice: "Don't tell me you're feeling there's not enough adventure from _that_? Haha, I mean, Mukuro... y'know..."

Yamamoto cast a brief glance at Gokudera, as if soliciting a second useful opinion, but Gokudera was making a sort of odd, sour face. Mainly because he had no idea how not to be rude to Chrome or say anything nice in the face of her choice of sexual partner. Mainly, he wanted to opine with, _well, I wouldn't fuck Mukuro,_ as if to make her feel less -- ordinary, but even Gokudera understood that might not be the best approach. 

"It's all a waste of time and a distraction, anyway," was all he could get out, with some effort.

"I never really knew you guys had that kind of a relationship," Yamamoto continued, blissfully. "Until, yanno, the whole... baby thing... so I guess you do..." And a laugh.

"Stop talking, idiot," Gokudera muttered. Really, did Yamamoto have to do that every time?

"I just..." Chrome looked down, looked at her toes from where she'd kicked her shoes off.

She wasn't certain whether she could say anything which didn't sound shallow and petty and like intoxicated nonsense. "You're kind. Both of you. I don't -- always feel I fit in places. I'm not a woman who can. And I... a job... the baby... I just." She shrugged. "I'm dull, I guess."

"That's kinda silly, isn't it, Chrome?" Yamamoto was removing his coat and his sword, and that was when Chrome realized that the evening had begun to glow pink and orange in the windows. "I mean, we always thought -- " Again, Gokudera was no help, preferring to sit silently on his side of the room. But after a strange hesitation, Yamamoto shrugged and smiled sedately. "We always thought of you as -- well, as one of _us_."

Chrome was A Bro.

You could relay information to her, trust her with secrets, walk out with her at midnight to defuse a hostage situation, and scout out suspicious figures at dinner parties with her. As current events proved, you could even kick back and have a drink with Chrome. Sometimes.

When members of other Families saw Chrome with the Vongola at evening gatherings, they would frequently ask after the beautiful, cool, aloof woman, and even Gokudera would explain that, hey, Chrome wasn't just A Lady -- she was Vongola, through and through. Fuck with her and you'd fuck with the Family. Fuck with her and she'd put you through some crazy illusionist hell, probably.

That's just it. Everyone knew what Chrome was capable of. They had seen her in Corsica, a baptism of blood and fire. They had seen her on the day she'd had that child and resisted anything to ease the pain. They'd seen her rise and limp from battlefields with her guts caved in.

And what the hell was she talking about, being _dull_?

"Listen, Chrome." Gokudera leaned forward conspiratorially, eyebrows furrowed in thought. "The Tenth always loved one girl and pursued her and married her and _look how they're living!_ And no one is greater than the Tenth! So what's with you, talking like that?"

"My mother died," she blurted.

She hiccuped wetly and pressed a hand to her face -- the hotness beneath her eyes now the hotness that comes before and after tears.

Oh. _Oh_. So that's why she had been outside, and _looking like that._ The shock? The -- grief? Quietness descended like a shower of rain. Yamamoto was looking at her with concern, but then he averted his gaze in response to how fervently Chrome was moving her hand as though to mask a rush of feeling.

Gokudera exhaled. Scratched the back of his head. "So why isn't he with you?"

Chrome wasn't crying. Tears held back, she looked Gokudera in the eyes and said, earnestly, "Because he doesn't understand it. Mourning."

"And you think we do, huh? Like some _dead mothers club_ or something?"

Yamamoto looked as though he was moving to gently rebuke that remark, but before he could, Chrome replied in a clear, crisp voice, "I think you do."

"Not for a long time." Gokudera broke eye contact to lean back in his seat. Now would be a good time for a smoke, but the last empty cigarette package lay at the bottom of the hotel trash basket -- and, anyhow, he was trying to quit that shit. Again. "I got all that out of me years ago. And I don't even think that idiot _remembers_ anything about his... "

"She died when I was little... as little as Reborn was when we met him." Yamamoto was still smiling in that genuinely kind way. "I'd be lying if I said I remembered anything about her. But my dad told me stories, and when he talked about her, it was like she was right there in spirit, because she was there in his mind -- things she said, and what she'd wanted for the two of us. People live on that way, you know?"

"It's different with me," Chrome said quietly. "All of my memories are..."

She pushed herself off the bed and walked on silent bare feet over to the window, where the thin tree limbs were aglow with the sunset on the remnants of the rain, and the world was going about its sunsets and daybreaks and rains and bird song without any care for the human beings who were living and dying on the planet's skin. Mukuro would find a poetic justice in that. He would approve, or he would say, _how strange are the lives of human beings_ in that detached way. Chrome hugged her arms to herself, feeling the frills and the straps of her dress, the way her breasts rose up in that still-unexpected new weight when she squeezed her body tightly. But her eyes remained on the world outside, where the darkness was coming to them.

"My memories are not good."

She was mourning not for the death, but for the lack of reconciliation. 

Chrome mourned for the absence of her own happy childhood. Chrome mourned for what-might-have-been but was not. Chrome mourned for her own life, accepting at last that truth which, somewhere within, she had always known: Her child would never know her mother's parents. The family from which she had emerged would never be a family again.


	6. and survive

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WELL, this is pretty much it -- yes, there will be one more scene, the epilogue. But here concludes the bulk of the story. I hope you've enjoyed it in the least. X'D I'll write more in this verse later, in all likelihood

A laboratory in Germany, Mukuro said, and the illusion flickered. 

The Tri-ni-sette had given him the idea, he confessed. Dr. Verde was the scientist who had, along with the other two, pioneered the study and engineering of Box Weapons, so why shouldn't he create such a technology as this? Mukuro lacked access to the Tri-ni-sette -- the pacifiers, the most powerful objects within it, were after all guarded by the detested Vendice, but he had access to other ancient and creative relics: Hell Rings. One which he had procured himself, one which Fran had yielded at his request (well, perhaps there had been some mild threatening involved, Mukuro confessed with a smirk), one which that man, Kawahira, had left behind at that time when he disappeared from this Earth, two others which Mukuro had come to by means which he insisted would remain quite private (and one of those two had once belonged to that inept Mist swordsman, Genkishi), and the final and most perfect (by Mukuro's estimation) which he had acquired through a mission he had assigned to Chrome. A special mission, you see, and if you wished to know the timeline -- well, it was sometime before the child was conceived. 

Before that event, before her creation, Tsuna gathered that something happened which changed the path of Chrome's life, and Mukuro's. Something which only Mukuro and Hibari Kyouya knew the full details of -- but which the others could vaguely guess at, based on the reports surrounding that timeline. Mukuro demurred: Her creation was planned, he finally and fleetingly admitted, but he would not say anything further on the topic.

"I know what you have been wondering about that child," Mukuro said, looking altogether contemptuously at Tsuna, "but I would never make such a careless mistake. Tsk, shouldn't you know better by now?"

But what prompted the change in lifestyle? Tsuna looked down the dark corridors of the illusory laboratory: it looked as imposing as Melone Base. Guards and sealed doorways.

"Don't hold the wrong idea of me, dear Sawada Tsunayoshi," Mukuro said, and the ghostly lights of his own creation lit the edges of his smile. "I will always act in my own interests."

"A new source of energy to power this world," Tsuna repeated. "So that's why -- "

"Why I was looking at the contraband within my car trunk and being pursued by ill-dressed investigators altogether lacking in ingenuity and imagination? Yes, perhaps so." Mukuro looked up and a sort of mock-baffled expression crossed his face as he touched his chin. "Although there are certainly other reasons I could imagine for such intrusions ... I do seem to have angered a number of people over the years..."

"Mukuro --"

"I know, I know. You're going to caution me of the dangers inherent in my every action. Does it not ever become tedious to you -- such useless worrying?"

"No. I was going to say that _if I didn't know better --_ " Tsuna said the words with a certain sarcastic emphasis, "-- I would think your personal project to be a rather altruistic one."

"You think so?" The shadows of the bedroom where they stood across the room from one another had begun to play upon his face, seeming to melt outwards from the concentrated power of the illusion at the room's center. Machinery flashed by as though projected upon an invisible computer screen, the transparent glow of ceiling flourescents, lasers: and there it stood, the reactor itself, before Mukuro's form, so you could look through his handiwork to him -- standing adrift, looking smugly pleased. 

"Ours is certainly a world in need of new options," Mukuro admitted. Energy crises -- and fuels were dirty, were they not? "However, as I said before, I always act in my own interests. Say, if someone were to produce a new form of power in this world, then create a monopoly around that..." Smiling, smiling. "Hypothetically speaking, of course, it could lead to... a certain dependence of the human race, shall we say?"

"You wouldn't," Tsuna said.

Mukuro's eyebrows furrowed and his face flashed with anger. He sucked in a breath and laughed in that utterly hateful way. "So confident of that, aren't you, Sawada Tsunayoshi?"

"Chrome knows of this?" Tsuna asked, rather than answering.

"And Hibari Kyouya."

"And you intend to activate that reactor with your own body?"

"I detest your questions," Mukuro said (almost fondly, somehow). He took a seat in a chair at the far corner of the room, trident propped against his side. Looked at Tsuna. "Go on. Say it."

Tsuna sighed. Mukuro. Insufferable.

"It's dangerous," Tsuna said, knowing that was what they both were expecting to hear. "Those are _Hell Rings._ You're playing with fire. Who are you doing this for? For yourself?" He looked down at the baby, still sleeping within his arms. "For her?"

"Because I abhor boredom," Mukuro responded, evading the true question. "And as I said, there's the whole business of world domination. The original sea of blood plan was, while ingenious, rather messy and somewhat improbable in practice. This gives me power in a more straightforward, entrepreneurial sense. It's terrible, you see, taking my success from such a capitalistic, human-driven system, but..." He sighed dramatically. "I'm afraid sometimes that's the best way to defeat the powers that be. From within."

Tsuna just clamped his lips shut, knowing better than to try to have it out with Mukuro over the logic of his bizarre ideas. Reasoning for his project aside, the reactor itself was so insane it might actually work. But. Still. Hell Rings. New, as-yet-untested power sources. Dr. Verde's facility -- on its final edges of construction. What shadowy organizations had funded this project? Tsuna wasn't going to ask. What he was going to ask, instead, was this: "Why did you tell me about your plans, Rokudo Mukuro?"

"Because you're my employer, are you not?"

The word "employer" was spoken in the most insincere tone humanly possible.

"You've never willingly accepted me or my father as that!" Tsuna responded... a touch too loudly, as the baby began kicking and started to cry. "Uh, that is to say -- " (More quietly now, just above a whisper, but the damage was done, and she was crying, and Tsuna was rocking her and gently _shhh-ing_ and oh God Mukuro looked like he was on the verge of bursting into the loudest laughter yet at the sight of it all...) "Mukuro -- "

"Look at that. You've gone and made my daughter cry. She dislikes your annoying voice as much as I do."

"Mukuro!" Another cry, and Tsuna whispered, "I mean..."

Come to think of it, as someone who had gone through the experience of _Lambo_ as a teenager, Tsuna knew what to expect when it came to children, and he was pretty sure he had never seen drool or any other unsavory expulsions on Mukuro's clothing. Mukuro must have been cheating. He had to be.

At any rate --

"I don't consider you an employee, Mukuro. I consider you..." He faltered, watching the intense, expectant gaze: Mukuro was all curiosity at that moment. 

"I consider you my friend," Tsuna admitted.

"Oya oya," Mukuro said. He stood up, brushing imaginary dirt from his jacket. "Incidentally..."

"Yes?"

"In the instance of my death, if it were to happen, or Chrome's, though I find that very unlikely --"

"M--"

"Don't interrupt. How rude." Placing a finger to his lips. "As I was saying: it _is_ , as you have observed, a dangerous lifestyle she and I pursue at certain moments. As is yours, but you've always been... irritatingly resilient. Like a _cockroach,_ really. If something were to happen... in any case, you would take that child, wouldn't you?"

"I would." Tsuna's voice was solemn. His heart twisted at the words. "But that won't happen. You and Chrome will be fine."

"Perfect," Mukuro said, ignoring Tsuna's last point. "So long as you wouldn't put her with that Electric Gamma... not particularly a figure I trust around young girls, what with his unfortunate habit of falling in love with them."

"Nothing will happen to you," Tsuna insisted. _You're the one who deserves the cockroach comparison,_ he almost added (somehow, he could hear it in Hibari's voice), but in the interests of politeness, said instead, "You're one of the most resilient people I know. And Chrome."

" _Memento mori._ Well, I think I've said enough."

When Tsuna didn't move, Mukuro added, a little more aggressively, "That's your cue to get out, Sawada."

Tsuna held out the baby in his arms, and Mukuro rolled his eyes and pointed at the crib.

"Tell Chrome I said hello," Tsuna added, following the instructions implicit in the gesture.

"Perhaps," Mukuro replied, looking away stubbornly, and Tsuna knew he would.

The illusion broke into ribbons of pale light, then vanished, and the room went dark.

~*~

That night before they went to sleep, Yamamoto had given Chrome a back massage. Initially, when he had proposed the idea, Chrome had regarded him with that blank, suspicious, edgy look that she reserved for the suggestion of human contact -- she had, in fact, immediately begun to squirm in her place -- but after a minute or so of deliberate thought, she gave in.

"Wow," he said. "You're pretty tense."

"Yes," Chrome said.

She winced as muscles around her shoulder blades and in her neck popped beneath his fingertips. Lying on the bed, Chrome looked over. Gokudera was resting face up on the opposite bed, one leg raised, knee in the air, and pillowing his head atop his hands, elbows pointed upwards. The intensity of his expression in the light of lamp -- Chrome wondered if that were her doing. Because of the issues she had raised. At least they had fond memories of their parents, Chrome thought with a touch of envy. At least. But, what good would it do, looking at things from that angle? 

When, afterwards, she changed into her spaghetti-strap tank top and pajama shorts, Chrome, standing near the closet, had bent over her suitcase and accidentally come into close contact with Yamamoto's gym bag. She gagged a little, masking it with a hand over her mouth, and quickly raised up and stepped backwards.

"Hey, c'mon, Chrome," he said from behind her. "That's a little harsh, isn't it?"

"S-sorry," she said, sincerely.

He laughed goodnaturedly. "That's all right. So I guess Mukuro doesn't sweat much, huh? Or maybe he makes himself smell like roses?"

"Roses?"

"Yeah! You know, or maybe tropical fruits?" Yamamoto was smiling thoughtfully (so to speak). "Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever been close enough to get a whiff..."

"What the hell is wrong with you?" That was Gokudera, who had been tuning the conversation out, but couldn't _quite_ ignore this particular detour. "That's _disgusting!_ " And, as he had done before, added, "No offense, Chrome."

 _No offense_ meaning it wasn't Chrome's fault that her taste sucked. Honestly, Gokudera was pretty sure even his sister wouldn't fuck that. Pretty sure. 60% certainty, at least. 

Well, okay, she might. But his sister was fucking crazy.

But, to the surprise of both, Chrome didn't stammer any sort of brief reply.

Instead, she made a tiny sound: hardly recognizable, at first.

Then, that sound again, somewhat mouse-like, and it took a minute of attentive listening for them to realize that Chrome had giggled -- was _giggling_.

Chrome covered her mouth demurely with one bunched fist, but you could plainly see was trembling ever so slightly with the force of her amusement.

"This conversation," she said quietly, as if someone had asked her what had tickled her so (though no one had done that).

Hey, Yamamoto wasn't complaining. It was good to see Chrome smiling again. And he was still pretty sure Mukuro smelled like flowers or fruits. Had to be one of those two. He supposed Chrome liked to be secretive, though.

"Thank you," Chrome said, and her eye shone with tears. A moment later, those tears were at long last streaming down one cheek and one cheek only -- always that reminder of where she had come from, what she had come out of. 

She smiled, tasting salt.

"You -- my friends. You make life livable. Thank you."

What could they do but smile back? Even Gokudera -- smiling as he turned his head and shrugged.

Human life was not eternal. Chrome had been painfully reminded of that once more.

You took what you could. A smile, a laugh, a silly remark. Sometimes it was enough to make the difference in how one felt when one laid down to rest, when the night returned to claim you. It wasn't always the great answers to the meaning of the universe that could get you through the day, but also the frivolous incidents -- the reminders of what it meant to be human. Alive.

What Nagi in her childhood had never experienced, through all of her loneliness.

What she had now.

~*~

Mukuro had criticized Chrome, obliquely, for not using her powers in recent times.

There were no lights. Gokudera was snoring softly. Beside him, Yamamoto breathed, appearing large and solid and strong in sleep: a faintly-moonlit form, reliably sturdy. In her bed, Chrome sat up, crossing her legs and clapping her hands together. Mukuro was right. Ever since they had moved into that house, Chrome had been slacking in her training. She closed her eye, purposefully. First came pure darkness, and the sound of breath. The internal eyes opened -- gradually, like shutters -- and Chrome felt out her interior space. Concentrating, she thought _Garden_ , and greenery began to grow. Flowers. _Walkway,_ Chrome added, silently, and the stones sprouted beneath her feet.

It was easy to walk through dreams, once you had been taught how.

Beneath the stars of an Italian night, beneath the milky way rendered in all of its picture book luster, beneath the Northern Lights, beneath an apple orchard growing alongside a silvered ocean frozen in acrylic waters, where the sky splintered into sunset and then descended into forever, Chrome walked forward. She was walking into eternity. 

This was the deathless, ageless place -- not Mukuro's this time, but her own. She had been building it for years, twig by twig.

Look in any direction and there were the faces she recognized. Boss, curled beside Kyoko, dreaming about happy days in Namimori during his youth. Chrome smiled. And there, on the other side of this nowhere place -- Hibari Kyouya, lying on his side, expression severe even in sleep. 

When Chrome took a step towards his dreams, his eyes flashed open, and he looked directly at her, though she knew he could not actually see her.

 _As expected of Hibari-san,_ she thought mildly, and took a step backwards.

This was child's play, of course. Chrome was pleased to see her comrades, feeling her love for each of them in turn -- a love that watches protectively from a distance -- but right now, she was looking for her daughter.

During her pregnancy, Chrome had clandestinely built castles for her daughter, talking to her, holding her before she was born. Saying (though she could not be understood), you are wanted, you are wanted. I will make a place of escape for you, as he did for me. But --

 _But,_ she would add. _You have to see reality, too._

That was important.

Chrome had focused her mind and held that tiny consciousness during the final stages when the brain was coming into a tentative capability of neurological awareness.

She had never told anyone about these one-sided conversations. Not even Mukuro. Someday, Chrome knew, he and her daughter would share their own secrets, their private conspiracies -- it was expected, really, with the way their family operated. Outsiders probably would not understand. 

What Boss and the others could never quite make sense of, but what was intuitive to Chrome herself, was that she and Mukuro only had so many pieces of themselves to give. 

Mukuro had the piece of himself that he shared with Tsuna. It was not like what he gave to Hibari, which was different from what he gave to Ken and Chikusa, M.M., or Fran. And Chrome? She saw something else in him entirely. They spent much of their time drifting from one another because it was important to keep shuffling these pieces and being viewed differently by different people. Being seen all at once, for everything that you were -- which was the closest thing to how they saw one another -- was too powerful. Too much of it was something like death. 

And Neuilly? She would have to have her own secrets, of course. And it was important that she not see Chrome all at once. Or Mukuro. She would have to discover their truths incrementally.

Which, really, was why they would have to be distant sometimes. Chrome hoped, pre-emptively, that the child would forgive them. 

And she hoped Tsuna and the others would -- though she supposed they already had.

If she concentrated _just like so_ , Chrome could tip the imaginative edge of Time within this world. It was a complicated technique which had taken her years to master, but just as the Ten Year Bazooka, Byakuran, and Uni proved, there were channels through which one could access the tentative corner of the future. 

Tonight, this was what Chrome wanted to see within the space between her dreams.

~*~

There was Neuilly, not as Chrome had known her, but as she would perhaps be someday.

She crouched with her back to Chrome, in one of those dresses that bared the shoulder blades. Sharp, angular in the way only a young girl's could be -- hadn't yours looked like that once? -- and all the more so from the way she hunched over her work. Chrome's heart quickened as her eye followed the length of her daughter's hair. On the baby, it was too short, too dark for the true colour to be clearly discerned, but now, streaming down her back, it was clearly midnight blue. Like his. And when she half-turned -- the crescent curve of her face, the smirk on her mouth, her inquisitve eyes -- the lines were all his, but softened. Feminine.

Her eyes were Chrome's in shape and colour. Large, introspective. But even those were lit with the ghostly smirk that played about her lips. 

Chrome recognized that wistful lifting of the eyebrows. The resemblance was stunning. And yet, for all the similarities, you could see she was clearly her own person. Soft and willowy, with those twig-thin arms that were also unique to little girls before a certain age.

And she was busy. 

Neuilly's shoulders were moving frantically and persistently. She was working. When Chrome stepped around her, she saw. 

Her daughter was creating artwork. But not with the standard tools.

She had wrapped her arms around a globe of water, spinning it this way and that. Within the globe, koi swam after illusory food particles. As Chrome watched, the child's nose pinched, and the gleaming scales of the fish disappeared, replaced by garish, crayon-flat colour. The fish became monochrome, then Neuilly waved her hand, and they disappeared entirely. 

There was only water now. A blank slate.

"I can't get it right," she said, with a slight mournful note in her voice.

Then, she shrugged. Wiped her face. "Oh, well. I will!" 

She hummed a long _hmm_ and dropped herself to the ground, lying on her stomach and looking down, doodling shapes in the sand with her fingertips. She was propping her face in her hands, as children so often did when peering over a colouring book or a magazine.

"You will," Chrome said. "I'll show you how."

At that, the child's hum began to take on a more stretched, groaning quality -- the sound of a strangled scream -- also a sound recognizable to young girls, and her eyes fixed straight ahead, nostrils flaring as she made this closed-lip, nasal whine.

"Or -- do you not want me to?"

Neuilly shook her head. Chrome wasn't sure if that was a "no, I do," or a "no, I don't," but then she said, aloud, "I'm mad!"

Chrome realized her daughter was wearing a giant white bow in her hair, right behind the place where her hair tuft would have been visible. As it was, the shorter hairs wound around the accessory and peeked out on either side, essentially masking her unusual inheritance.

"Come here," Chrome said gently. She waved her hand, creating a bench, and sat down.

The child rolled around for a few seconds, flopping on her back. With a sort of dragging reluctance, she crawled, rose to her knees, then stood up and pulled herself onto the bench. Chrome threaded her fingers through that long hair and cradled her head, pressing her lips to Neuilly's brow.

Chrome was looking down at her with sympathy. How frustrating it must be to be a little girl in this world -- a little girl driven by artistic passion, by creative frenzy. When Neuilly looked up at her, when Chrome met her gaze, she noticed what it was about the eyes -- that distracted, fidgety look that overlay some cleverness, the mark of restlessness. Oh, Chrome knew what those eyes meant. Those eyes meant obsession. Another reflection of him. 

Perhaps even a reflection of herself.

But a more perfect Chrome. A Chrome who had never been taught doubt.

No, Chrome already knew. This girl would have the opposite problem. When you were talented and praised from birth, you became haunted by the ghost of your own expectations.

Chrome wiped the sweaty forehead. 

"It takes time," she said.

The child jerked against her, pressing her face into Chrome's dress and muffling her next words, but Chrome understood them:

"I've never beat Mukuro..."

"Is that what you want to do?"

Neuilly nodded against her.

"So did I," Chrome confessed. Again, between the two of them.

Her daughter pulled back, peering up at her with renewed excitement. "Did you? Did you do it?"

Chrome pressed her finger to Neuilly's forehead, smirking suddenly. "I can't tell you that yet."

_Before you were born._

Neuilly _awwww_ ed loudly and then complained, "He never goes easy on me when we play!"

"That's because... he really wants you to win. Someday." And Chrome wasn't just saying that to make her feel better. She knew there was a twisted, paradoxical truth to the words. What, exactly, did the word _play_ entail? Chrome was pretty certain she had some idea. "To win -- you have to know your father. What do you know about him?"

"He's old."

Chrome coughed. "Um..."

"My panties itch," she added in a sort of non-sequitur -- and, still nestled against Chrome, the child indelicately reached down and fisted her dress, adjusting herself through it. Why she had felt the need to announce that particular fact was never properly explained, but Chrome was not about to ask where she had picked up _that_ quirk from.

"You'll learn when you're ready."

Chrome decided to leave it at that.

"I want a pony and I keep trying to make one but it falls apart after a while but I can make pictures of ponies." She perked up. "Want to see?"

So Chrome spent the night dreaming of watching ponies, and thinking, with every heartbeat, _don't grow up. Don't grow up._

Tomorrow, after the funeral, she would return home. She would hold that baby close, for in a few years, that baby would be dead, replaced by this girl, who would someday be replaced by a woman. As Nagi had been.

Tomorrow, she would bury her past.

Tomorrow, she would face Mukuro again, and the future she had made.


	7. ubi sunt?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> done! /o/
> 
> kyoko-fic or more 8018 next. or something else, idk for sure yet. :|a;;;
> 
> BUT, DONE? cheers.
> 
> this fic was written while listening to some rad songs. Dark Paradise by Lana Del Rey (naturally), Hollowpoint Sniper Hyperbole by USS = two of the ones I was listening to while writing. haha, love to write to music. :B;;;
> 
> please enjoy.

The will made no mention of her. 

In the end, Chrome had not expected that it would.

There was a cold wind coming out of the north, the sky looked as though it might release rain once again, and Chrome, wearing a dark pink jacket and lavender skirt, hugged herself tightly. She curled her toes within her flat dress shoes and walked away from the ceremony, where the priest had finished his Sutra. Chrome had burned her incense.

An open casket ceremony: Nagi's estranged, erstwhile mother was still smooth-faced. 

But now it was being nailed shut. Cremation would proceed.

Mixed medication and too much alcohol, the coroner had concluded -- an accident, not a suicide. An intemperate personality. Chrome looked down at that face before the funeral ceremony began, staring at the closed eyes as though seeking some greater truth about the nature of the universe. 

She knew it was silly, trying to solicit from the dead, but she still stared, numb, thinking in the back of her mind that maybe there was some code here. Maybe if she looked long enough, she could understand why she had never been loved. Maybe she would know what had gone through her mother's head on the day she cast Nagi's life aside, or what it had meant when Nagi had been conceived, carried, and born.

Now that she was a mother herself, maybe Chrome had been thinking she could look down at this face and understand how you could not care for that which you had given birth to.

And maybe she believed that when she looked down at her mother's face, she would see herself inside of there somewhere. Maybe she would understand herself. Why she acted as she did. 

Maybe, she had thought, she would understand _Chrome,_ or at least Nagi.

But there was no absolution. No universal truth. No sense that Chrome could transform the sense of personhood that permeated her body. She could not make a wish over her mother's body to become the daughter that would have pleased her parents and have that wish come true.

What Chrome _did_ realize, as the coffin was closed and the body removed from sight, was that she didn't need that, anyway.

Gokudera and Yamamoto had offered to accompany her to the funeral, but Chrome had politely declined. 

Her friends had business to attend to. She was certain of it. And this was somewhere she had to go alone, something she had to do for herself, for all that she appreciated the thoughtful gesture. 

Before they parted, Gokudera had been saying something like, _listen, Chrome, I have to tell you, Mukuro and I almost had a fight the last time we saw one another,_ and he had confessed this so dramatically and with such a sincere note of concern that Chrome did not have the heart to tell him that Mukuro had not mentioned one word about their near-conflict, and, in all likelihood, he had not paid it the slightest thought since the incident had occurred. Tsuna's actions and opinions did have a visible effect on Mukuro, but Gokudera's behaviour patterns were altogether another matter. Chrome had simply nodded and assured him that it was all right and that she was not angry.

Once outside the funeral home, Chrome found herself beneath a shadow.

A quick glance upwards confirmed the source of the light's obfuscation: a black umbrella, the stem of which was held by a hand on an outstretched arm.

Chrome smiled. Mukuro was already smiling. 

"You came," she said, a touch surprised. Her eyebrows lifted.

"It would seem that way."

"And you brought _her."_

Chrome knelt down before the stroller, one knee to the ground, reaching within and embracing her child -- her amazing, _alive_ child, who was fully human and who could not have been made with all of the powers of illusion in the world. Chrome held her, kissing each tiny finger, and silently apologizing for all the times she had been afraid. 

The instinctive, by now expected tug on her hair did not even so much as faze Chrome. Her scalp might suffer a little, she knew. Her daughter was strong.

"Well." Mukuro kept the umbrella over the three of them. "I was thinking of leaving her behind as a paper weight, but then it occurred to me that children should develop a healthy appreciation for funerals."

With his free hand, Mukuro gestured in the direction of the funeral procession, where the hearse was proceeding to transport the casket to the crematorium.

"Ashes to ashes, as they say."

"Thank you for coming."

Chrome said it with a voice full of feeling, but this time, she was not on the verge of tears. It was unthinkable, crying now. She wanted to laugh, ringing laughter that could reach up to the sky before the rains came down on them.

"I like funerals, myself," Mukuro said, whimsically. "Particularly Japanese funerals, what with the food and paper money given to the dead. The artifice pleases me. As you know, I am one to appreciate style."

"I know," Chrome said, swaying slightly and stroking her daughter's head as she began to lull against her body. More quietly, just above a whisper: "I know."

"Besides," Mukuro continued, taking a deep breath, "I couldn't properly leave my best friend to suffer alone, now could I?"

There were times when Chrome did not know what to say. There were times when she was too overwhelmed to speak. This was one such moment. But it was all right, standing in the shade beneath the coming rain, watching the pretty, complacent look on Mukuro's face -- the way the shadows fell across the red of his implanted eye.

~*~

That evening, Chrome received a call. A certain someone in France had decided that he needed a special bodyguard for six weeks. That was how business went.

Of course, this would mean leaving the baby behind with Mukuro -- except, _oh no,_ Mukuro insisted, eyes twinkling -- dear Chrome, did you really not suppose that he had his fingers within a few French pies? _One can always uncover a means of productivity!_ In any country in the world, darling Nagi.

Chrome stood in the adjacent bathroom, watching Mukuro's silhouette out of the mirror as she brushed her teeth. She spat, rinsed the brush, gargled mouthwash, spat again, washed her mouth out, and walked into the bedroom once more, bare feet sinking into the carpet.

Mukuro was sitting up, sheets pooled around him. With his long hair down, Chrome's attention was, for some reason, drawn to the faint shine of his earrings in the barely-there light of evening. Mukuro propped his chin on his hand and gave Chrome a long, smug smirk, and all she could think was that his cheeks were still faintly flushed and a faint sheen of sweat still clung to his skin and his eyes were still faintly cloudy, faintly distant. _Contented and tired_ was a good look on Mukuro, she had long ago decided.

Chrome cleared her throat.

"I want to have more sex," she said. "I--" She straightened her shoulders. Lowered her voice: "I want to _fuck you."_

Her shoulders relaxed again, and she coughed, and in a much smaller voice, added, "Ah! If ...if you want, I mean."

Mukuro threw his head back, clapped his hands together, and _laughed and laughed._

And Chrome decided she was never going to be good at this whole Being Sexy routine.

"That's all right," Mukuro said, as though reading her thoughts (which, all things considered, he probably _did_ ). "Verbal limitations aside, you're quite adept at getting the task done in practice."

"Thank you. I think... you are, too."

"You know," he added, "sometimes it occurs to me, what with Sawada Tsunayoshi being married -- that must mean, you realize, that he is sexually active. Isn't that impossible to imagine? Horrifying, really. How would he cease flailing long enough to -- "

" _Mukuro,_ " Chrome nudged his shoulder, mock-chastising. "Be nice."

"That's impossible!" Mukuro was chuckling goodnaturedly as he gently pulled Chrome closer, seating her onto the bed beside him, where they faced one another, exchanging meaningful looks.

"Do you ever..." Chrome hesitated. "Do you ever think about how ... things could've turned out differently? Do you ever -- regret?"

She was thinking about the day before, with Gokudera and Yamamoto. She was thinking of all the relationship experimentation she lacked. 

Chrome understood herself to be terribly inexperienced, and, in a manner of speaking, still unworldly and unwise in the ways of other human beings. Maybe Mukuro noticed. Maybe he felt she was lacking sometimes, too, for all that they were close in ways that not everyone else could understand.

"What a question... yes, I suppose I do consider whether things could have turned out differently..." He tilted his head, looking at the rings on his fingers. "Had I not failed to defeat Sawada Tsunayoshi? Furthermore, that unnecessarily messy ending to my _brilliant plan_ to destroy all life on the planet... "

When Chrome was silent, Mukuro added, "But youthful indiscretion has a way of overstretching itself. It's all somewhat embarrassing to me in retrospect."

"I meant more like. Relationships."

 _I meant me,_ Chrome wanted to prompt.

"Ah, those. Well, had I been thinking ahead of time about Fran and Neuilly, I imagine I _might_ have parted on a different note with Lancia. In view of the _unfortunate circumstances_ between us and our parents, it would serve better for that child to have something like an older guardian."

Okay, Chrome would grant that he was right to regret that one, if he was serious. Spurious reasoning aside.

"This reminds me. I should contact _senpai_ again. Surely he would be perfect for the task of babysitting -- he always did love children, no matter how dubious their natures."

Oh. That smile. Chrome shifted in place. She did not have the emotional energy to touch on _Lancia_ again, considering how their last conversation on that topic had gone. All together, Mukuro had gleefully missed the nature of Chrome's inquiry. But that was all right, she decided. In a way, it was most the most telling answer. He had never questioned her place with him. And that was fine, because a life without him in it was unthinkable.

"Incidentally, if you wish to have round two, we had best hurry before the little devil wakes up and starts crying. You never know. She might."

Chrome laughed. 

"I'll make imagery to distract her," she decided. "To help her sleep."

Who knew she would be faced with such uses of her powers?

~*~

 

You once believed that happiness was an illusion.

> In your dreams, where you can see the world that lies beneath the world of daylight, where pasts and futures converge, an urn of ashes scatters in the wind. If you turn around, you see a child who was once named Nagi, standing alone with solitude in her eyes. In a flash, years pass, and she is replaced by that little girl with the long blue hair and the haunted smirk. Only the eyes remain on the face -- but happier eyes, these. Life itself was an illusion, Nagi believed. But those eyes remind you that nothing can undo our lives which we have lived in this universe. The imprints will remain, somewhere in time. _A cycle,_ Mukuro said. 
> 
> "Good night," Chrome says to sky as the ashes are carried by the winds up into the celestial heavens. "I have to get up now."
> 
>  
> 
> _u b i s u n t?_
> 
>  

Chrome opens her eye.


End file.
